Inclusive Cultures Blog: ‘There is strength and power in diversity of experience’
2022 Inclusive Cultures participant Lindsey Butcher reflects on her learning from the programme.
I attended Clore Leadership’s Inclusive Cultures back in 2022 when the pandemic was in recent memory. The course was still relatively new but was led by a team woven together in their lived experience of disability, it felt immediately safe and held.
At the time my company Gravity & Levity, an aerial dance company founded in 2003 was, like many other live performance companies still in the throes of figuring out how to survive and continue beyond the Covid years; negotiating how to offer spaces for us to gather in numbers and practice our craft beyond this strange time.
The nature of our work is about trust; trusting our bodies, the equipment, building a team – it’s relational. As a practice, at its best It’s hugely freeing, pushing boundaries of heart, mind, body, and imaginations and at times, punishing in its pursuit.
Inclusive Cultures was an invaluable few months to reflect on my own leadership as a role model, both in my artistic practice but also in my deafness, something that I had never really centred for myself before, but lived with and alongside.
My artistic practice is very much about physical rigour and this, coupled with the fact that I’ve been in the industry for 40+ years and still catch myself in a ‘the show must go on’ mentality, like many others I push myself too hard.
During Inclusive Cultures I began to consider what, as a sector leader, I might be communicating to others about best practice in demonstrating this work ethic; about not being able to flex, respond, re-align or about rest and reflection as integral to well-being and creative practice.
I learnt that there is strength and power in diversity of experience, my deafness can be a route into more expansive, inclusive ways of being and doing that people can see themselves reflected in.
Through this rethinking of practice and of how we show up for ourselves and others I have:
- Built a completely new governance model that is flexible and responsive to what the company actually needs, and not bound by inappropriate business archetypes.
- Found immeasurable strength and joy in nurturing new artistic partnerships with Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent practitioners in the UK and internationally.
- Created more opportunities for those most marginalised to take part in our creative professional development events, symposiums and festivals.
- And finally, front all events with my own lived experience, care, nurturing with a team that reminds me that this is generative.
The course was completely pivotal in allowing me to see what I needed to centre and the aerial dance community are reaping the benefits of that.
I urge you, don’t miss this opportunity to take the time and space to explore leadership and inclusive culture making and your role in shaping that.
And in case I’ve piqued your interest in exploring some aerial dance, in August 2025 we’ll be running our annual European Aerial Dance Festival in Worthing.
For more info and to book >>>> https://eadf.co.uk/
