Greenwich Dance to close at end of the year

Greenwich Dance is to close permanently at the end of this year and has entered redundancy consultation today (October 23) with its staff, the company has announced.

Its board said the decision followed the Royal Borough of Greenwich’s removal of its longstanding voluntary and community sector funding in January, as well as an unsuccessful national portfolio organisation application to Arts Council England last year.

This has led to a “major destabilisation of an already fragile funding situation”, resulting in the loss of further Royal Borough of Greenwich project funds, according to the board.

Greenwich Dance’s nine applications to ACE National Lottery Project Grants have also been rejected.

Over the past year, the company has sought different funding models to support its work and protect its staff. These included the National Lottery Community Fund, City Bridge Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation and Esmèe Fairbairn Foundation.

Melanie Precious, Greenwich Dance’s chief executive and creative director, recently criticised the "rhetoric of ’winners and losers’” in the press when covering the ACE funding decisions, and how the company was coping amid its lack of funding. 

She said of the decision: “It is with deep regret that we announce the closure of Greenwich Dance. Ever since the loss of our NPO funding in 2017 we have been consistently navigating financial challenges, but the lack of time we had to adjust to the Royal Borough of Greenwich’s withdrawal of funds earlier this year put the organisation into an immediate critical state.

“Add to that the context of the current political and socio-economic climate and it has simply become impossible to uphold our fundamental mission.

“By continually chasing project funding, we risk limiting the organisation to whatever it is funded for. We believe in the transformational power of our work and if we are unable to fulfil this ambition then we cannot continue.”

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