The StepBack project supports inclusion of English traditional performing arts in Higher Education and its use by professional creative artists.
It seeks to ensure that the traditions are available and understood as source material to inform both education and creativity amongst arts professionals.
StepBack takes as its premise that the living tradition of performing arts is a genetic pool of material, style and vocabulary, and that its diversity is best preserved in the community.
The English traditions have not evolved in isolation, and the process of interaction and exchange with other cultural sources continues through direct exchange and osmosis within the evolving and diverse community in England.
Nevertheless, we consider that it should provide an essential part of course material to students in England studying any of the performing arts.
To this end we establish a two-way exchange between the community and professionals, and seek ways to learn how better to teach the tradtions so that they may be used creatively as an element inspiring and informing new work and artistic practice, without becoming a pastiche.
Similarly English traditions are deserving of academic study and research. With a century of collection in the field they provide a unique insight into the issues surrounding collection of ethnic traditions, and the weakness inherent in treating material resulting from field research as fixed and immutable.
