12.10.2026

3 min read

You Are Enough However You Show Up Today, reflections and observations from Wanna Dance? Lead Artist, Ruth Spencer. Find out more about the project here.

Recently, during a Wanna Dance? session, one of my dancing partners fell asleep.

On the surface, this might not seem particularly remarkable. People become tired. People rest. For many, it may even appear that the session had come to an end. Yet the experience stayed with me. I found myself reflecting on what it means to dance with someone and what it means to be with someone.

In many areas of life there is an expectation that people should actively participate. We often measure engagement through visible actions, we look for movement, responses, eye contact, conversation, evidence that something has happened.

When none of these things are present, it can be tempting to assume that nothing is taking place. Yet as my dancing partner slept, I chose to stay. I sat nearby and noticed the rhythm of their breathing. I noticed the quietness of the room. The light falling across their face and the stillness that had settled around us. The session had changed but it had not ended.

Jane describes such moments as being, not waiting.

That distinction feels important.

Waiting suggests that the present moment is somehow incomplete. Waiting implies that the real activity will happen later, when the person wakes up, moves again or becomes more visibly engaged.

Being is different?

Being asks us to attend to what is already here. The rhythm of breath. The experience of shared space. The presence of another person. The simple act of spending time together.

As I reflect on this experience, I realise that it touches something that sits at the heart of our work. Across Wanna Dance? we often talk about creating opportunities to be with one another. Not doing to, fixing or extracting. Simply being with.

This practice has gradually led me to question some of my own assumptions about dance.

· Does dance always require movement?

· Does participation always need to be visible?

· What counts as engagement?

· What happens when we stop expecting people to produce something for us?

These questions matter when working with adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities, whose ways of communicating, expressing themselves and relating to others can be very different from those within conventional dance settings.

The experience also raises aesthetic questions. As dance artists, we are often trained to notice action, movement, transformation and visible expression. Yet encounters such as this invite us to ask whether stillness, rest and shared presence might also have aesthetic value.

What happens when we attend not only to movement, but also to breath, pauses, quietness and duration?

What forms of dance become visible when we learn to value these moments as complete in themselves, rather than waiting for something else to happen?

One comment made after a session troubled me. A staff member asked:

‘Do you think you got anything out of him?’

I suspect the question was well intentioned, but it prompted me to reflect on what we value within these encounters. The question assumed that the purpose of the session is to obtain something from someone. A response, an outcome, evidence, a result.

Yet increasingly I find myself wondering whether it might be more useful for us to ask:

What happened between us?

This feels closer to the spirit of the work. The dances we create emerge through relationships built over time. Through paying attention. Through noticing and being noticed. Through becoming familiar with one another’s rhythms, interests, preferences and ways of being.

Sometimes these encounters result in full-bodied energetic movement. Sometimes they lead to music making. Sometimes they reveal new movement possibilities. Sometimes they lead to laughter. And sometimes they lead to sleep.

When they do, I am learning to resist the temptation to see sleep as an interruption, a failure or a pause in the work. Instead, I am beginning to understand it as another way of being together. Is my practice aligning with a belief that: You are enough however you show up today?

By this I do not mean that nothing can happen. Quite the opposite. Some of the most unexpected moments of creativity, connection and authorship emerge when people are welcomed as they are, rather than seeking them to become something else. You are enough however you show up today is an easy statement to make when someone arrives ready to move, communicate and engage. The real test comes when they show up differently: quiet, distracted, restless, frustrated, still, asleep. If we truly believe that people are enough as they are, then we must also make room for these ways of being.

I do not yet have answers to all the questions this experience raises.

What I do know is that it has encouraged me to look differently.

To notice differently.

To remain with moments that might once have been overlooked.

It has reminded me that when we stop waiting for something else to happen, we often discover that something is already there.

Reflections written after an earlier session:

You teach me to slow.
To join your quietness.
Footstepless, you arrive in the space.
And hold a quality of presence.
Light touch, minimal impression and yet,
in the holding,
the being present,
being still,
you bring weight,
and space,
and time.

Reflections, 29th May 2024