We are delighted to share that, with investment from The Linbury Trust, The Headley Trust, and the Wolfson Foundation, we’ll be delivering our Building Lighting Upgrades Project, which will fully upgrade the remaining lighting across the Jerwood DanceHouse into sustainable LEDs. This follows an Arts Council England funded project completed last February to upgrade our lighting and theatre equipment.
What’s Happening?
Over the next year, we’ll install and reconfigure 412 LED units across five studios, the foyer and café, meeting rooms, offices, bathrooms and hallways, and our iconic tutu lighting sculpture.
Rather than replacing existing fittings, we’ll rework what’s already in place. This approach cuts down the environmental impact of making and moving new materials, while allowing us to reuse existing components and reduce waste. The upgrades will improve lighting quality while keeping the DanceHouse looking and feeling like the much‑loved space it is for dancers, staff and audiences.
Why This Matters
Fluorescent lighting was industry standard when we opened the DanceHouse in 2009, but they are power hungry, with short shelf-lives, and are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as components fall out of production. Moving to modern, energy‑efficient lighting is a more sustainable long‑term solution.
Once complete, the upgrades are expected to deliver around a 50% reduction in lighting-associated power consumption (excluding the studio theatre, which has already been upgraded), alongside simplified maintenance and an improvement to the quality of light throughout the building.
The project will also reduce waste by removing the need for routine lamp and ballast replacement and will reduce working at height as part of ongoing servicing.
From a Greener Theatre to a Greener DanceHouse
This work builds on our Theatre Lighting Upgrades Project which was completed in February 2025, funded through a Arts Council England grant. It replaced our theatre’s performance lighting, working lights and projection with modern, energy‑efficient versions, resulting in significantly less power usage.
Now, our theatre is now one of the greenest, most up-to-date dance performance spaces in the UK, equivalent to the newly created Sadler’s Wells East.
Thanks to this new investment from The Linbury Trust, The Headley Trust, and the Wolfson Foundation, we’re able to take that same quality and efficiency and apply it across the rest of the DanceHouse.
You can read more about the Theatre Lighting Upgrades Project here.
What This Means for Our Future
As a charity, we rely on funding and generosity to care for the Jerwood DanceHouse, and to ensure people across the East of England can access the life‑enhancing joy of dance. Improving how our building operates is therefore about more than efficiency alone, it is to support artists, welcome communities and deliver our work long into the future.
By moving away from fluorescent lighting, we’ll significantly reduce energy use and cut the need for frequent replacements. Using more efficient lighting means fewer materials need to be made, transported and disposed of, reducing waste and lowering our environmental impact year after year.
These improvements will also reduce ongoing maintenance and energy costs, helping us spend less on running the building and more on what matters most: our artistic programme, community activity and artist support. In this way, environmental responsibility and financial resilience go hand in hand.
You can read more about DanceEast’s environmental policies here.
With Thanks to Our Funders
We’re grateful to The Linbury Trust, The Headley Trust, and the Wolfson Foundation for supporting this essential project. Investment of this kind is vital to ensuring the Jerwood DanceHouse remains a future-facing home for dance, embedding sustainable practice in how we operate, maintain and develop our building.
We will share updates as the project progresses and we look forward to sharing the full impact once the upgrades are complete.
