YR ARDD
Yr Ardd was a site-responsive community dance project that took place at Global Gardens in Cardiff in summer 2026. Created by dance artist and researcher Iona Hannagan Lewis, the project brought together people aged from 2 to 75 to explore movement, creativity and connection through the garden site.
Yr Ardd formed part of Pleasure Gardens, Iona Hannagan Lewis’s MA research project in Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism at London Contemporary Dance School. Yr Ardd was supported by the Arts Council of Wales Creative Communities Fund and London Contemporary Dance School.
As autumn draws in and the leaves begin to change colours, I find my body holding memories of summer - to the searingly hot days and long evenings, and to Yr Ardd, a community dance project I ran at Global Gardens.
Across four mixed-age workshops and sessions delivered in collaboration with a local nursery, around forty participants came to dance in the garden, responding to the plants, soil, weather, sounds and stories of the site.
The project centred a co-creative approach to movement - rather than learning set choreography, participants were offered invitations to move, make, play, draw, write and experiment.
At the heart of Yr Ardd was an approach to collaborative dance-making that treated the site as an active participant. Rather than bringing a pre-existing choreography into the garden, my focus was on creating conditions for participants to respond creatively to one another and to their environment. This approach enabled people with different ages, experiences and relationships to dance to contribute to the work in different ways.
Care, choice and play were central to this process. Participants could decide what they did, how they participated and whether or how they shared what they made. These choices were not simply ways of making the project more accessible; choice for me is a creative method, fostering an environment in which people can take risks and develop their own movement languages.
Food was part of each gathering too, with our final celebration seeing participants sharing a Persian feast made by Sahar Saki, using produce from the garden. Alongside movement, making and conversation, it was beautiful to observe how these shared moments helped create a space for people to meet and connect.
Over the course of the project, I became increasingly interested in what can happen when we pay attention to allowing relationships to emerge and unfold, rather than starting with ‘the end’ - a finished dance piece - in mind. Yr Ardd became an experiment in how we might collectively create the conditions to support meaningful and creative connections: between people, between generations, between bodies and place, and between humans and the more-than-human life of the garden.
The project culminated in a celebration at Global Gardens on 14 June 2026, where participants shared co-created dances and a zine, made by Ella McKenzie, containing drawings, writing, images and dance-objects made during the workshops.
This film, made by videographer Lauren Heckler, offers a glimpse into the project and some of the people, movements and connections that emerged. It is, of course, only a partial record - traces of the many encounters, large and small, that emerged over a summer. What remains here is a trace of a season spent moving, making, growing, eating, playing and paying attention together.
By Iona Hannagan Lewis
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