Welcome to safer dance!

This website is dedicated to provide to dance organizers and communities resources to create safer dance spaces.

It will feature documents, best practices, and discussions about strategies to improve safety in our dance spaces.

If you want to get to the goods fast, you can go to the kit page and find posters, a generic code of conduct, a cheat sheet and record keeping tools. There are more models of codes of conduct on the dedicated page!

You can also explore the different pages that detail how to create a safer dance space. You can go through them in order!

This website doesn’t intend to be prescriptive. A lot of the examples are rooted in making swing, blues, and fusion safer and more inclusive of the lgbtqai+ community, and develop verbal consent. However, I hope to create a resource that helps any dance community, and I’d be really happy to include successful initiatives coming from different cultures and dances.

About me

My name is Ouardane Jouannot and I dance, DJ, teach, organize, and mediate conversations in the dance community. I mostly dance fusion, but I have danced salsa, bachata, merengue, kizomba, tango, blues, swing, rock… I have dealt with safety in the dance community as a safety coordinator for Yale Swing, Blues and Fusion, European Micro Fantasia, as well as my local fusion scene and want to share my experiences and opinions on those topics.

Credit

A lot of people have been of tremendous help along the way and have helped me think and work on this topic. I’d like to give a big shout out to Grace, Elsbeth, Cat, Anne, Laurel, Ann-Caroline, Ethan, Marshall, Heather, Aleks, Shane and many others!

Special thanks to Sarah for her dedicated work and editing this website!

Contribute!

I’d happily create more posters that are relevant to your dance community. Please comment on the pages, or start a Facebook thread to discuss the content. It might evolve to include contributions! You can also reach out to me directly using the contact page.

I reserve the right to remove any comment that propagates harm.