Hello KND followers!

I hope you have enjoyed lots of summer antics and are now getting ready for shorter days, cosier nights and your continued artistic ventures.

Since our last newsletter we have certainly hit the ground running with numerous activities:

Earlier this year, I was invited to be the Patron of Constella OperaBallet and I am privileged to support this young, driven company alongside Barry Wordsworth (Conductor Laureate at BBC Concert Orchestra). Constella OperaBallet re-launched in July at Sadler’s Wells and it’s a delight to advocate their brilliant work from this point onwards.
 

At the end of September, we celebrated KND’s fourth birthday! We commemorated with a series of masterclasses, individual mentoring sessions, a professional development forum, a KND Performance Mentoring Programme (PMP) alumni event, plus we announced our new Advisory Board. It was a fun-packed week!

For the past four years, our KND masterclasses have been an important highlight within our in-house events programme. This year - hosted at Rambert Studios on the South Bank - we built on the success of this annual series by adding individual mentoring opportunities as part of our commitment to professional development in the UK.

It was a joy to work with our amazing musicians, Barry, Domenico and Chris, and such a coruscating, driven group of artists who generously shared their talents and energy with gusto.



In the midst of the series, we also scheduled a 'Professional Development Forum' creating an opportunity for the participants to talk to us about their lives as a professional freelance dancer in the UK. Thank you to all those who attended and shared your struggles and concerns with honesty and openness. All is being noted and absorbed at the KND headquarters, so watch this space!

During this very full week, we also organised a much-needed KND PMP alumni gathering to catch-up and capture achievements of the 30 artists we’ve supported under the PMP umbrella to date. It was fantastic to fuse the two cohorts together, see everyone again, and share all achievements, both personal and professional.



The whole week amplified the importance of training at a genuine professional level, and the necessity of creating space for freelance networking and sharing. 
 

I am currently preparing for an imminent trip to Finland to contribute movement workshops at the ICON (Innovative Conservatoire) seminar. Working with classical musicians in a cow shed (!) just outside of Helsinki, I am looking forward to seeing my dance practice ideals mirrored within their musical approaches, and also meeting some fantastic, new, international friends.

Excitedly, we have been awarded funding for a KND organisational development period this autumn from Arts Council England. This work will take on many different forms during this phase but most visibly - as you will have read in our last newsletter - we have created the KND Advisory Board to steer us through the next chapter of our KND journey.

We have our first Advisory Board meeting this week and we are itching to get all of these fantastic members in one room! KND is embracing courage over comfort and are looking forward to getting started.

As is the KND way, we leave you with a quote to motivate your last three months of 2016!

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin."

Ivan Turgenev

Best wishes to you all,