Last year in November 2022, Laura Jones and Lucy began their tenure as Co-Artistic Directors of Stopgap. After a year of collaborating in these roles, we wanted to sit down with them and hear about how this first year has gone. Interviewed by Access Artist Lily Norton, Lucy and Laura share the secrets behind their working processes, reflections on their journey to leadership, and outline their hopes for the future of the company.
Working Collaboratively
Q: How would you define your roles as Co-Artistic Directors?
Laura: In my role as Co-Artistic Director I focus on Creative Learning and Advocacy, whilst Lucy in her role as Co-Artistic Director has a focus on artistic product. It’s really helpful to have these clear defined roles, but also know we’ve got the other person to bounce ideas around with. By splitting focusses across the company we aren’t doubling work, but more so complimenting each other and providing support.
Q: Do you think this balance between creative outreach and artistic product differs from other artistic directors, companies and the way they work?
Lucy: I think it’s unusual because right from the beginning Vicki, our founding AD, always said that creative outreach is just as important as artistic product. There was a time when I was sole artistic director where we had to really work on the artistic product because we became a devising company and that was new to us. However we had loads of ideas for the creative outreach, we just didn’t have the capacity to do it because Laura was still performing and doing so much teaching. Then once Laura became Co-AD, it feels like the creative learning and outreach has got much more stability, vision and a drive.
Q: More and more the industry and organisations are valuing collaborative leadership and not just having one person in charge, what has this leadership model given you over the last year?
Laura: Reflecting on the way I work best, I do some of my best work collaboratively. Whether that’s with you, Lucy, or with the Creative Learning team and artists like Cherie. I value that space for conversation and collaboration, even if it’s talking through ideas, I feel everything becomes stronger and clearer by working collaboratively.
Laura: As artistic directors we have the final say at both the beginning and end of a process, but then in the middle there’s so much that we draw on from the company. It’s being able to listen to different voices, ideas and opinions and act as a filter for that. When you open up to listen to other people, sometimes that’s when surprising things can happen or it may take you in a different direction, or it may reaffirm that the direction that you’re going in is the right one. To have that feedback and that opportunity to reflect is vital.

Two people dance closely together in studio. To the right, Senior Dance Artist Hannah balances in a lunge sideways away from the camera, her body parallel to the floor and arms stretched wide. Behind her to the left, Rehearsal Director Amy kneels in an open lunge, arms extending behind her, as she leans across Hannah's arm and shoulder. Hannah is a learning disabled dancer, she’s white with blonde hair tied back and Amy is a white non-disabled dancer with dark brown curly jaw length hair.
Reinvent. Reflect. Refine.
Q: Lucy you’ve previously described your’s and Laura’s workflow as an organic process of Reinvent Reflect Refine. Can you elaborate on how this works in practice?
Lucy: I noticed it before Laura became Co-Artistic Director, I would often come to Laura with a slightly unusual idea where I’d taken something that was quite traditional, thrown it up in the air and tried to make it fit our purposes. Laura and I would reflect on it with the team around us. We’d experiment, trial and keep it quite under wraps to begin with. We’d share it with our circle of associates who are generous with their time and will explore new ideas with us. Then Laura would take it on and refine it further.
Laura: Each time we’re finding new approaches. Rather than going ‘Okay, this is what we do, we’ve sorted it with this’, it’s instead always about improving and interrogating. Thinking: ‘Is this the best way? Can we improve it? How can we build on that? What’s new? What developments are there?’. There’s always a constant kind of evolution – evolution and progress.
Is there one really key example of this process?
Lucy: I would say Seedbed is a pretty clear example. When I first came to Laura with the idea of Seedbed, it was in response to work we’d done in the Netherlands. I had the idea of bringing in external Disabled dance artists and theming each session around their own individual lived experiences and how they would have liked to have been taught dance. At first Laura worried about this approach, separating people’s experiences out and looking at things in isolation. We then refined the idea together by including an intervention module that revisits Stopgap’s inclusive approach to dance and working with a range of diverse dancers in between the individual sessions.
Q: Working together for over 20 years must give you great insights into one another and how you work. What do you think each other’s key strengths are and how that benefits the company?
Laura: Lucy I think you’re very good at the big vision and the sparking of ideas.
Lucy: I’m probably happier to take a risk and try something out. Laura’s a critical thinker. Laura’s good at seeing where the flaws are, which is really helpful. Laura you hold on to the core of Stopgap, the original flame, you stay so true to that. I find that quite incredible, especially in these changeable times. We’re listening to all the different edges of the arts community bending this way and that, and I can feel quite anxious about it, feel so swayed by it. Then Laura’s there, just holding the line.

Six dancers in a bright studio. In the foreground Christian, a non-disabled white male dancer with shot dark hair, pauses in a plank position, hands clasped. On his legs rests Mo, a short-statured Disabled Black woman with dark hair tied back, she reclines back and grips Christian's calves. in the background to either side, two other duets are blurred.
Learning from the past
Q: January 2023 celebrated over 20 years in the company together alongside Chris Pavia, how does it feel to get here?
Laura: There was a point where we seemed to vary a lot in terms of our focus on performance. We would be performing in schools and day centres, then we did a lot of rural touring and then we did a lot of outdoor touring. And I thought about how we keep changing. But then I thought about it and actually we were always taking dance to people and being an access point. We were always reaching out to communities who weren’t traditional contemporary dance audiences.
Laura: Stopgap always felt a little like the underdog, constantly knocking on the door. But to see the company grow to the size it is, having the impact and respect it does now, reaffirms what we knew back then – that what we’re doing has a lot of value.
Lucy: We’ve been criticised in the past for trying to be everything to everyone, but we have to be a responsive company because people aren’t doing what we need them to do to make the industry fairer. Therefore, we have to train young people, we have to train professionals, we have to train teachers, we have to create indoor, outdoor and digital work. Being agile and being responsive has always been a part of Stopgap’s personality even as we grown older the industry still seems to need us to fill (stop) the gaps…

A close up of two young learning disabled dancers as they link hands in the centre. On the right the young dancer with chin length dark blonde hair, wears a mustard yellow jumper and smiles at their partner. On the left the dancer looks at their joined hands, they have a long dark ponytail, wear glasses, a black jumper and a face mask.
Looking to the future
Q: Next January sees the launch of Stopgap’s Future Leaders programme pilot, in which mid-career Disabled professionals join the company for a year and become embedded in company activity. What led you to design the program this way?
Lucy: I’ve been thinking a lot about future leaders and how you train someone to be a leader – at first I didn’t really know. Then I thought about how we learned to be leaders, and Chris Pavia is a huge part of that journey. Often when guiding Chris, I could trial things with him and he wouldn’t judge me so much, it was a safe space to make mistakes and those mistakes taught me a lot. That’s why we feel by bringing our Future Leaders into the company and learning on the job, we can teach them it’s okay to make decisions that don’t work, because we can learn from it and reflect on it. Whilst highlighting the importance of needing good decision makers and listeners when working in an inclusive company.
Laura: There is definitely something about wanting to create a safe space to try. Right at the start, Vicki, when she was artistic director, was very careful about almost shielding and protecting us in certain situations, just for a while until we felt more secure. Because there is such a lack of Disabled leaders, there’s times where it’s very easy to feel like leadership is thrust upon you and that you have a responsibility to be a leader. And that can work really well for some people, but not for everyone. So making sure there is this real safe space with support and encouragement, rather than just impressing on them that they need to become leaders to help improve statistics.
Lucy: Hopefully they will feel that. I think sometimes when change makers are integrated into an organisation, it’s overwhelming because there can be so much that needs to be changed and they simply can’t do that within a year. Maybe not even within ten years. But I think by bringing them into our inclusive culture where we’re honest about saying ‘this is going to take a long time’ may help them feel more secure and confident to contribute their important voices.

Stopgap's diverse dancers and management staff sit in a circle on a bare wooden floor of a dance studio. There are roughly 25 people sitting in the big circle, on a chair, in their wheelchairs, or on the floor.
Q: Where would you like to see Stopgap and the dance industry in the next ten or so years? Some companies embed into their mission the aim to be obsolete in years to come, is this something that you think about?
Laura: It’s a weird one, to hope that one day you’ll be obsolete because the industry has evolved in such a way. But I hope that we will still have ambitions for progress. There’s always going to be areas that can be improved upon, we just don’t necessarily know what they are yet. It’s like new technology, you don’t know what will emerge in the future and you don’t know what the new challenges might be. I hope whatever lack of provision or barriers arise, we always have a drive to address those challenges.
Lucy: We have to remain solid and continue progressing, not give up as soon as there’s a bit of representation, because everything is so fragile. We have the luxury of time and employ people full-time, I think we’re ahead on making new discoveries around inclusion, whether that’s in choreography or the culture of the company. Other companies may audition diverse dancers and employ them, but they may only be able to employ them for six weeks, especially in this current climate. There’s only so much you can learn from each other and exchange in those six weeks.
Laura: As well as having the recognition with touring and being a go-to company for people to come and watch, but becoming a go-to hub with our training offers. It would be lovely to have our own studio. To be able to continue building this hub where we have capacity for people to come to us, to be able to pay them for their professional development and broaden the impact we can have. Over the years our impact has certainly increased, but there’s always more people to reach.