Erika Jayne Goldsmith
2023 PRESENTER
PRACTICE OF DANCE | INCLUSIVITY
Erika Jayne Goldsmith is a Meanjin-based cultural community development practitioner, performing artist and producer dedicated to fostering healthy communities and producing important art.
As a dance artist she has trained and worked across multiple cultural and contemporary dance forms. As well as freelancing she currently performs and/or produces with Dance Masala Bollywood Dance Company, YCV Dance Studios, and NUDO, a new cultural and contemporary dance company which she recently started with Yasim Coronado Veranes. Key artistic achievements include the production of two multidisciplinary cultural diplomacy works funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, involving artists from Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Sudan.
Her cultural community development practice has seen her deliver creative and educational programs in a broad range of challenging and resource limited contexts including correctional centers, immigration detention centers, youth and community services, and in community. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Dance) and a Bachelor of Human Services from QUT and is a Dance/Movement Therapist in training having completed the Alternative Route Dance Therapy Program at the Dance Therapy Center in Montreal.
In 2017 she founded Bring A Plate Inclusive Dance Company which has become a significant vessel for both her community and arts practice, in particular focused around ‘inclusion’. This has involved developing Bring A Plate’s model for supporting universal access to their classes and experiences. Erika believes that by bringing diverse groups of people together, a dance class can represent a microcosm of the broader community and facilitate the development of empathy and collaboration that reaches beyond the class and into people's daily lives.
Bring A Plate (BAP) is an inclusive dance company that has been consistently bringing people together, celebrating diversity, and creating safe spaces since 2017. BAP can be found activating urban and green spaces through participatory dance and storytelling. Founded on the pillars of community, inclusion, creativity, agency, sustainability, and fun, BAP challenges Australian society’s perception of who can dance, how to dance, and where to dance. We do this through our weekly outdoor community dance classes, site-specific performances and flashmobs, safe and inclusive dance parties, live sessions with local musicians, and dancing in public whenever we can.
