Launched on World Ballet Day 2025, the Access Ballet Collective brings together a group of committed organisations and individuals exploring how to make ballet more accessible and equitable.
Kate Stanforth Academy of Arts is an official partner with The Royal Ballet School, providing professional termly inclusive dance classes at Covent Garden and online. Photo by Shona Cobb.
ENB's Audio Described performance of My First Ballet: Swan Lake during a Touch Tour.
Northern Ballet dancers and Ability dancers in Every Little Thing is a Change. Photo Lydia Hutton.
Young dancers at the ballet barre, representing bbodance's drive to make adjustments and special considerations in examinations.
Joe Powell-Main performing on stage alongside Ella Appleby. Photo by Kirsten McTernan
NYB All In! Classes, The Dance Space. Photo by Jules Renahan
NSCD's students in the studio. Photo by David Lindsay.
Young dancers from Rambert School's Access Ballet Initiative. Photo by James Keates
Suzie Birchwood works to help every body feel included, through creating commonalities in movement and language.
Suzie Birchwood at Ballet Cymru’s/National Youth Arts Wales Season’s of Change event which explores inclusive ways of working in ballet. Photo by: Evan Dawson
For the Collective, inclusion, equity and access aren’t “add-ons”. They are creative drivers, and lasting change will only happen if organisations learn together, share responsibility and take practical action over time. The ABC isn’t about replacing anyone’s existing work. It exists to strengthen it, so that learning isn’t locked inside individual organisations and access moves from the margins into the centre of how ballet thinks and operates.
“The ABC launch marked not just a meeting of minds, but a commitment to action. Together, we are ready to enhance and strengthen the groundbreaking work already underway — and to ensure that access is embedded at every level of ballet training, creation and performance.” – Suzie Birchwood, dance teacher, trainer, mentor and Stopgap’s Co-Chair.
Our aims
The Access Ballet Collective is working towards:
- Connecting and coordinating: building relationships across organisations so access work is less isolated and more cumulative
- Shifting the culture of ballet: moving from “inviting people in” to redesigning the conditions of belonging
- Centring lived experience: keeping Disabled perspectives and the realities of barriers as a guiding force
- Treating access as artistic and structural: about authorship, aesthetics, training and opportunity, and who gets to shape the form
- Building collective momentum: sharing successes, naming obstacles and creating a stronger joint case for change across the sector
Updates and News
The launch coincided with World Ballet Day in 2025, discover more and read messages from the collective celebrating the launch in this news item.
The Collective met for the first time in January 2026, hosted by Birmingham Royal Ballet. Disabled dancers were central to the day, and lived experience shaped the conversation and grounded the ambition. The momentum has already begun. Stopgap’s Co-Artistic Director Laura Jones shares her reflections here in this blog: Momentum for Meaningful Change – let’s drive the next evolution of ballet.
Download and read the first ABC newsletter, highlighting the work being done by the collective, this shares newsletter shares resources and opportunities.
A shared commitment to change
Stopgap's Co-Chair and Chair of the ABC launch, Suzie Birchwood, shares reflections from the first meeting of the Access Ballet Collective.
Read the blogThe Collective
Logos of ballet cymru, Birmingham Royal Ballet, bbodance, English National Ballet, JPM Productions, Kate Stanforth Academy of Arts, National Youth Ballet, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Northern Ballet, Rambert School, Stopgap Dance Company, Suzie Birchwood.
