Taking it to the streets
Dec 28 2008 The Journal
Two Teesside entrepreneurs have the world at their feet. Alastair Gilmour gets inspired by dance.
Urban Kaos revolves around street dance, impromptu performance and loud, loud music. It is run by Kelly Heaviside and Amy Colclough, inarguably the two most exuberant, spirited and wholehearted young entrepreneurs to come out of the North East.
Their Stockton-on-Tees business was founded on taking energetic dance routines out into the street and bringing the street into theatres and studios. They invite groups of sullen, stubborn teenagers to shake their bodies just a bit, just once, to “try it, you’ll love it”. The girls’ persuasive powers and the stimulating music eventually release pent-up animation and before long those same teenagers are running, spinning, hopping, bending, stretching and pumping every muscle in their bodies. They’re hot, they’re out of breath, their legs hurt and their arms ache, but they smile from ear to ear – and they love it.
“The boys are the worst,” says Amy. “We get them with their arms folded going ‘I’m not dancing’, so we introduce a few games or get a basketball and ask them to throw a few hoops which we put dance moves into – and before they know it they’re right into it.”
Urban Kaos very nearly never saw the light of day, however. Amy and Kelly had met while working for a touring cabaret company and realised quite quickly they were working for bullies and everything was going wrong.
Kelly says: “We had to be skinny, we were too fat; we had to have a certain look, we didn’t look right; we had to be tall... it was heartbreaking and brutal. We started to hate dancing.
“If you won the Lottery you’d do a celebration dance, you’d enjoy yourself and that’s what dancing should be about. So, the two of us sat down and thought ‘what can we do to make a life’, then ‘why not teach kids ourselves?’. Now we’re going into schools and making loads of noise and working with special needs people and kids from estates. They don’t even realise it’s exercise and, if nothing else, it helps people forget everything for an hour.”
Amy and Kelly – who sparkle and bubble with high-octane chatter – have even gone out into Stockton High Street to get Saturday shoppers dancing around their carrier bags. It sounds fun and could be dismissed as frivolous but this is a deadly serious business model with countless social and community benefits.
“We’ve been doing this for three-and-a-half years and we’re bringing dance to people who have never ever danced before,” says Amy. “We got involved with an adult drugs rehabilitation course where we did dancing sessions as part of their programme. We got 100% positive feedback and they all wanted to do it again. We also worked with a boy who was locked up in the youth offenders centre at Aycliffe for drugs offences. When he was released he carried on coming to our dance classes. He lives in Newcastle and still gets the bus twice a week. Now he’s going to college and working with people supporting anti-gang and anti-crime culture.”
Urban Kaos are constantly invited to use their talents for schools careers advice, sex education, drug awareness and anger management – all through dance.
“We do a drop-in class where we get rich kids, poor kids, black kids, white kids, all from different backgrounds,” says Kelly. “It’s really good team-building, an eye-opener. And we learn lots of new swearwords.
“Government agencies such as Asylum Support, Connexions and Sure Start get the funding and pass the work on to us. We’ve taken groups of kids to dance events in London and Barcelona; we’ve created pieces to be performed at the Lowry in Salford and Dance City in Newcastle and did a summer school at the Arc in Stockton. We didn’t think it was going to be this big.”
The girls had such a strong idea and such a definite business plan that they qualified for a Prince’s Trust grant for a sound system, leaflets and business cards. Now they can proudly announce that Urban Kaos is recognised among the top ten dance companies in the country; they giggle as they recall meeting the Queen at a garden party; they cheerfully admit they’ve turned down Dragon’s Den – twice – and they almost trip over with enthusiasm showing off the three prestigious business awards they have gathered.
A new venture is a website www.westsidestore.co.uk which sells clothing and accessories for breakdancers and skateboarders.
“We’ve found a bit of a niche in the market,” says Amy. “What we’ll do next is set up a little empire. We’d love to take Urban Kaos across the UK as a franchise, make it hot and recreate all these projects – we know how much kids relate to them.”
Kelly has one regret, however. She says: “It should be funky, but we can’t do it on our own. We’d love to employ someone to do our admin.”
That would allow more time for youngsters to go running, spinning, hopping, bending – and smiling.
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