This is my third crack at being guest editor of Animated, and the experience has once again been a daunting pleasure. Why daunting? Because there are so many stories to tell from within the ever-spinning world of community dance, and a dizzying number of angles to take on it. I can't think of another area of the industry as diverse in its outlook and as ripe with possibilities as this one is. It's this multiplicity of interests and viewpoints that the magazine's production team and I have tried to highlight in the choices we've made about what to include in the current issue.

We may not have quite tapped into the range of particularities encompassed in Shakespeare's 'seven ages of man' speech from As You Like It, but at the very least we've made room for what independent dance artist Wendy Houstoun refers to as the 'small, middle and big people' in her writing on Dancing in Time. The latter, as you'll discover in these pages, was... Read more