Candoco Dance Company Tickets

Candoco Dance Company is the contemporary dance company of disabled and non-disabled dancers.

Candoco Dance Company was founded in 1991 by Celeste Dandeker-Arnold OBE and Adam Benjamin. The Company developed out of integrated workshops at London’s Aspire Centre for Spinal Injury and quickly grew into the first company of its kind in the UK – a professional dance company focused on the integration of disabled and non-disabled artists.

Artistic Director Celeste Dandeker-Arnold OBE commissioned 30 new performance works for the company from internationally renowned choreographers including Emily Claid, Javier de Frutos, Doug Elkins, Siobhan Davies, Fin Walker, Darshan Singh-Bhuller, Annabel Arden and Stephen Petronio. Celeste’s priority was that Candoco should be programmed and judged as a dance company, not a therapeutic project. Her ambitious commissioning strategy reflected this vision and became the backbone of the company’s success, catapulting it into the mainstream dance world from the very beginning. In 2013 Celeste won the Liberty Human Rights Award in recognition for her work.

Candoco’s former Artistic Co-Directors Stine Nilsen and Pedro Machado were appointed as Celeste’s successors in 2007. Having danced with the company for seven and nine years respectively, they brought a natural understanding of the company’s ethos to the role and continued to push the boundaries of the definition of dance with bold and diverse commissions. They commissioned work from leading choreographers Emanuel Gat, Rachid Ouramdane, Wendy Houstoun and Javier de Frutos, restaged Trisha Brown’s seminal Set and Reset to include disabled dancers for the first time, and commissioned the UK’s leading disabled choreographers; Marc Brew and Claire Cunningham for Unlimited – part of the London 2012 Cultural Festival. Under their directorship they took Candoco from the Bird’s Nest in Beijing to the Olympic Stadium in London; performing at the handover ceremonies in 2008 and returning, alongside Coldplay, at the Paralympic Closing in 2012. In 2018, Ben Wright and Candoco founding member Charlotte Darbyshire joined the company as Artistic Co-Directors.