Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at The Place

The Place is unequivocally committed to being an organisation that puts equality, diversity and inclusion at the core of our work. This drives our vision: powering imagination through dance, championing new ideas, embracing risks and creating a dance ecosystem unlike any other in the world, with optimal conditions for dance artists, learners and enthusiasts to realise their full potential.

We recognise the power of the arts and education to inspire and imagine a positive future where barriers to participation are removed. We seek to work in partnership within the dance, arts and higher education sectors and within our local area of Camden to further our ambitions and impact.

Our Governors and our staff focus on this commitment daily in their work, driven by the challenges we have set ourselves and those held by all our stakeholders – the communities of artist, learners and audiences we serve and those who fund and support our work.

Our workforce, audiences and programme do not yet represent the diversity of London. Both structural inequalities and our own mistakes have contributed to this lack of representation and made people feel unwelcome or excluded. The work we need to do to bring about real and lasting equity in our work and more widely in dance, culture and society will be an ongoing process and we will continue to listen, learn and further our commitments and actions as we strive to do even better.

We have developed an organisation-wide Equality and Diversity action plan based on 10 commitments and crossing all of our work including our board, recruiting and retaining staff, student recruitment, responding to the Creative Case for Diversity and reaching and engaging a diverse audiences.

Our 10 Commitments

1. Create and embed a culture of equality, diversity and inclusion within the organisation and building that welcomes all staff, students, artists and audiences.
2. Ensure all our Governors and staff are accountable and working together, in allyship, to make change and improvement.
3. Provide anti-racism education across The Place, to understand and confront individualised and systemic racism and privilege.
4. Have a zero-tolerance approach to any form of harassment and offer staff, students, audiences and artists clear ways to have their voices heard and feedback acted upon in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion.
5. Promote inclusive language and recognise individuality by working towards disaggregating statistics and KPI's with all our stakeholders.
6. Ensure our learning curriculum and performance programme reflects the global and evolving breadth of dance as a contemporary art form.
7. Increase the diversity of our governors and all areas of our workforce.
8. Increase diversity of student population and ensure necessary support and culture for all students to thrive.
9. Increase our collaboration with artists with a breadth of lived experiences and whose work embraces practices and ideas that are relevant to a diverse audience.
10. Proactively seek partnerships with local organisations that represent the diversity of Camden and collaborate with them to deepen our relationship with the communities they represent.

The Place statement on non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in cases of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct

The Place endeavours to always protect and prioritise the wellbeing of students at LCDS. In line with this commitment, The Place does not and will not use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to prevent complainants from reporting matters relating to sexual harassment/sexual misconduct to the police and other relevant regulatory bodies, or anywhere else.

Following completion of any investigation, and while upholding the principles of natural justice, students retain the right to warn others about perpetrators of abuse or inappropriate behaviour.

Settlements resulting from any such investigation will not include the use of NDAs or similar agreements that restrict transparency.