About Us

Yorke Dance Project was founded by Yolande Yorke-Edgell in Los Angeles in 1998, after dancing with Rambert Dance Company in London and Lewitzky Dance Company in Los Angeles. The company quickly earned a reputation in the States for producing distinctive and well-produced programmes of dance working with choreographers from both countries. Yorke Dance Project relocated to the UK in 2009 and continues to produce work in both the UK and USA.

The company’s work is diverse in style and content; to date the company has created a number of works for the stage and in 2010 created 12 new art works, comprising 3 dance pieces, 2 music compositions and a film, as well as creating and facilitating several new works for youth dance companies. This year the company has performed at Glastonbury Music Festival and Westwave Dance Festival in San Francisco and will be collaborating with the Pennington Dance Group in Los Angeles at the end of the year in addition to creating and researching ideas for 2012.

We design our programming initiatives to promote and foster a vibrant culture of education and participation for professional and community dancers, while creating critically acclaimed and popular productions for national touring. Part of our programming vision is to reintroduce UK audiences to the work of Bella Lewitzky, a pioneer of modern dance on the West Coast whose company closed in 1997 and whose work has not been seen in the UK for decades. Yorke Dance Project is the first and currently the only professional company in Europe with the rights to perform Lewitzky’s works. And we are the only company we know of with a commissioning strategy aimed specifically at supporting female choreographers.

Yorke Dance Project works in partnership with Take Art Somerset, and Creative Ecology Wiltshire. The company has received funding from Arts Council England SW and Youth Dance England SW and we maintain corporate sponsorship from Causeway Foundation. We are currently looking for more support from private trusts and foundations and private individuals to continue to develop our unique Youth Dance Leaders Programme as well as the main company activities.
Yorke Dance Project is based in Cornwall, Somerset, and London.
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