Co-founded and led by Artistic Director Gary Clarke and Executive Producer Annabel Dunbar, Gary Clarke Company is a pioneering, award-winning dance theatre company based in South Yorkshire. Renowned for high impact, high quality, and high legacy work, the company tours extensively to middle scale venues across the UK, nurturing new partners and touring networks at home and abroad.
Our mission is to create exceptional dance theatre projects which connect, strengthen and inspire communities, participants, audiences and artists. We work with professional artist’s and working class and marginalised people, forging enduring relationships to ensure authenticity in the telling of our and their stories. Our creative practice redefines the ways in which people can be part of creative processes and the making and performance of excellent shows and in doing so, we bring fresh voices, stories and perspectives to arts and culture. We work with care and respect for our family of artists, creative workers, collaborators, community participants and audiences.
Gary Clarke Company’s place in the national dance ecology, the regional arts sector and in communities nationwide is demonstrated by a successful track record of funding, levels of engagement, overwhelmingly positive feedback and numerous national awards including a UK Theatre Award for Achievement in Dance and a Critics Circle National Dance Award for Best Independent Company. Four and five-star reviews for the company’s shows have appeared in The Stage, The Herald on Sunday, Scottish Stage, The Times, and The Big Issue.
“Growing up in Grimethorpe during the 1984/85 British Miners’ Strike had many challenges, yet it shaped me into a resilient and passionate dance artist. The unshakable community spirit in my working class upbringing inspired me to create socially driven dance works. I have a driving desire to explore how transformative dance can be, what it can communicate and how Gary Clarke Company can positively represent, inspire, empower and enrich the lives of people underserved in the arts, proving emphatically that art is for everyone.”
Between 2016 and 2026, Gary Clarke Company co-created 3 full-length theatre shows (COAL | WASTELAND | DETENTION) which toured extensively across the UK and abroad presenting a total of 121 performances across 60 mid-scale venues in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Germany.
Attracting over 35,000 show audiences of which 42% were first time attenders with 36% from the lowest 20% of arts engagement (in England) alongside engaging over 19,500 people as participants across the combined tours.
Raising over £3.4 million through co-commissioning funds and venue fees, workshops, public grants (Arts Council of England; National Lottery Programmes and National Portfolio Organisation from 2023.24 as well as Creative Scotland, National Lottery Open Funds), recent Local Authority support (Barnsley MBC) and a John Ellerman Foundation 3-year award (2024 – 2027) plus a dash of private income.
In 2021 Gary Clarke Company transitioned from a highly successful independent company to become a company limited by guarantee, a registered charity and an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.
★★★★
“An absorbing, immediate slice of history rendered with the kind of emotional truth that depends its impact as popular entertainment”
Our aims are to:
- Make extraordinary, powerful work that marks, reflects and comments on significant events in working-class social history, politics, culture and people.
- Involve and engage people from diverse communities in the research, development and performance of touring shows, local projects & digital works, empowering them through a sense of ownership and achievement.
- Be a force for good in Barnsley and South Yorkshire through working collaboratively with local partners and involving local people in high quality creative and cultural activities with the potential to effect transformational change.
- Build lasting partnerships with venues that nurture and grow audiences in areas of England (and beyond) where arts engagement is low.
- Demystify dance for venue staff with little experience of the art form, increasing their confidence and skill in promoting and presenting it.
- Support the development of young, Northern producers and creatives from marginalised communities.