London is a place that houses many creative individuals but their talent often goes unnoticed in a high tech, money minded society. The reason I launched Alliance Dance Unit was because there was never any place like this for me to attend while I was growing up. The only option I had was to roam around with friends on the street to cure boredom. A lot of people moan that there’s a lot of anti-social behaviour on our streets which is true, but the residents that have their cities managed by councilors and MP’s need to state the fact that we need more things for people to engage in. Not just children, but young adults, adults and elderly people too! And not just focusing on one specific “ethnic minority” for god sake that’s why there’s segregation still going on. If you want to engage the community, you have to include EVERYONE and allow EVERYONE to mingle and get to know each other. That is how society progresses and moves forward and not backwards.
At Alliance Dance Unit we have turned hundreds of un-confident individuals into bold aspiring performing artists in a very short space of time. What we do totally relates to a lot of people of all ages, ethnicities and genders. We break barriers between higher parts of society and lower parts of society and have everyone working together as one big family. Awards are given out at our yearly awards evening for all students that are part of our team and for students that have excelled in the past year. People that attend ADU feel that they are part of something really worthwhile which is what I love.
In the future I hope to expand Alliance Dance Unit and be able to operate from a studio we can call our own, and be able to run on more than just 2 days a week. We have a lot of people on our waiting list ready to join but we cannot cater to more people at this moment in time which is a shame, so hopefully we can overcome this by sourcing some funding to run our own studio and services.
To anyone that’s thinking about starting a new idea but isn’t sure about launching it, I’d say just do it once you’ve done a little research because if now isn’t a good time then when is ? The journey might be long and tedious but if you try and have fun along the way then you can’t lose, and you’ll meet some great new contacts.
It’s taken me since September 2013 up until now just to have our planning accepted by Hounslow council to grant permission for our dance/arts studio, around 7 months of stressful phone calls back and forth, people trying to stop our applications and abrupt customer service is all what we’ve had to put up with these past few months which has now caused another delay in our funding which was ready at the time. But you just have to put your armour on and fight your way through the no’s and what if’s. You also gain a lot of experience while doing so by learning how to deal with extremely difficult people and seeing for yourself how bizarre some companies operate.
Sometimes it’s hard not to lose heart while you’re in the process and sometimes you might think forget this I want to give it all up! But just imagine how great you’ll feel when you’ve proved all of the people that said no to you wrong.
You can stay engaged with our progress at:
www.facebook.com/alliancedanceunit
Twitter: @ADUOFFICIAL
Twitter: @TorronLeeDewar
Thank you for reading and enjoy the journey!