How do you get involved with dance?
Linda Fearon:
I have always loved dance, my whole life, and I always wondered how I could get involved in dance. I was much older when I started compared to other dancers. I was around 40 years old, maybe 41, when I had my first dance class.
I had had my family before I started taking dance classes. And ever since I started I have just kept going because I just fell in love with it.
Helen Hall:
I was one of those kids who used to make up dance routines to Madonna songs in their bedroom. I just always loved dancing. I was also into gymnastics as well. I always loved moving and movement.
Where did you go to take the classes?
Linda Fearon:
It was actually in Belfast, an organisation called Open Arts. They do all sorts of arts activities for disabled people and they had open dance auditions for setting up a dance group called “Luminous Soul”, and I went to the audition and I got in.
It started off as a course for two years learning from trained dancers. We had to develop our skills over that time. I am still with Open Arts now, many years later.
Helen Hall:
I used to go to a local leisure centre and they had a dance group which you would go to every Saturday morning and after that there would be shows, things like that. When I was about 17 I started attending dance classes in the Crescent Arts Centre.
I remember there were classes for African dance and Flamenco dance and one day I was watching the class that was in before the one I was going to and it looked intriguing. When I looked through the brochure I saw that the class was contemporary dance, and I decided to join that class in the next term.
That was with Jenny Jordan and there was a second class with Jill Burns. From then on, I just kept going to contemporary dance classes.
How do you develop from there?
Helen Hall:
I can remember looking through the university brochure when I was in 6th form and if you wanted to study dance you had to go away. I would have liked to leave here, but as someone with sever sight loss, I didn’t know how I would support myself, as jobs such as working in a bar or shop aren’t easy for me, with my sight. So I stayed here and studied English, but I always kept looking for dance opportunities, workshops, things like that.
Eventually I went travelling and when I returned I did the HND (Higher National Diploma) and took classes with Sandy Cuthbert. And while I was doing that, “Luminous Soul” started and through that programme I was given lots of access to be able to learn how to work in inclusive ways.
I went over to London to build my experience teaching inclusive practise and I have just gone on from there.
What kind of Dance were you interested in?
Linda Fearon:
When I was a child I wanted to be a ballerina. I used to make up dance steps in my bedroom the way teenagers do. There were lots of dance styles that, even though I wanted to do them, I just couldn’t do them physically. I have Cerebral Palsy.
I would try to make myself go to ordinary dance classes but I would always chicken out because I thought I probably wouldn’t be able to do the dances. I knew I wouldn’t be a perfect dancer and I just couldn’t make myself go because I thought the classes wouldn’t be open to me.
I wanted to be a tap dancer, ballerina, but one day I watched a programme about contemporary dance and I thought that was a style of dance that I could do, that contemporary dance was something, despite my disability, I could be part of.
Someone sent me an email about Open Arts and the person who sent it to me said, you love dance, you should apply to this. And the rest is history.
Information about the Bounce Festival and “Tales from the Mother” can be found at the link below
