The former Scottish Youth Dance Festival celebrates its 21st birthday with the key to the door of a new home.

It seems contrary to suggest that youth dance groups ever grow up, but this past year has seen the Glasgow-based Ydance (formerly the Scottish Youth Dance Festival) clock up 21 years of moving and grooving all across Scotland. So how appropriate is it that, in recent weeks, the company has been given the key to the door of a bright new space in the refurbished Briggait?

If their ground-floor office is still showing signs of settling in, then the vast backlot area of what was once the city’s fish market is still a blueprint waiting to happen. A passer-by might see no future in the bare concrete floors, towering walls still clad in clinically white tiles and a double-height open space that soars upwards on pillars to an iron-girded roof. Andy Howitt, Ydance’s artistic director, can envisage the kind of light-filled studio spaces and rehearsal rooms that will allow The Briggait’s resident companies to fulfil new ambitions and provide fresh opportunities for people to participate in the arts.

It’s all a far cry from when Howitt – when he still finishing his own dance training – fetched up at what was then the National Youth Dance Festival. “It must have been 1979 or 1980,” he says. “And looking back, it was clearly the predecessor, the model, for the Scottish Youth Dance Festival (SYDF). I remember being given a little bit of money to make a work on Stirling Youth Dance – and it felt fantastic. I was in my fourth year at Laban [Centre for Movement and Dance in London] and here I was, with a budget, actually a very small amount of money, a project for the summer, a chance to make my own ideas and then present the piece at a festival where all these UK youth groups were gathered.”

The buoyant warmth that floods through Howitt’s recollections is an early clue as to why, despite his achieving career as a dancer and choreographer, he felt drawn to the challenge of making youth dance really count for something in Scotland. In that endeavour he is backed to the hilt by Ydance’s executive director, Carolyn Lappin, who, like Howitt, can’t help but voice a passionate concern for all the children and young people across Scotland who never have a chance to connect with dance.

“Of course, for some, it’s a fun thing. Maybe even a hobby,” says Lappin. “But there are the others, the ones for whom dance could really be their thing. Kids who often don’t know where their talent lies – and suddenly you can see it, when they realise that dance is something they’re good at. Their whole personality just takes off. At the moment, however, we don’t have the kind of infrastructure in schools that they have down south, so talent does go unsupported and undeveloped. At Ydance we try to plug those gaps wherever we can.”

As Howitt and Lappin sketch in the kind of work that the company undertakes – the interactive educational resources on CD-Roms and DVDs, the initiatives that bring young asylum seekers together with local teenagers, the Free To Dance workshops that focus specifically on teenage girls in Ayrshire, Glasgow and Orkney – it’s clear that more than just a name changed when Howitt took over the SYDF helm. He transformed the whole operation into Ydance, a rebranding that happened in 2002, after the Scottish Arts Council had provided advancement funding to allow the company to expand on its remit.

Howitt laughs, thinking back to the early days of SYDF in the 1990s, when the annual summer melee of youth groups from all across Scotland (and beyond) would spend a week in full-on activities led by professional teachers and choreographers. Back then, it was a moveable feast. Dingwall, Stirling and Dumfries all played host. But as the locations changed, so did the times. “The year I took over, 1999, was crunch time,” Howitt explains. “The plan was to have the festival in Aberdeen. And then I was shown the figures. What the festival needed, and what they could hope to get, just didn’t add up. The next year we staged this tremendous MM Festival in Stirling. But even with Millennium Lottery Funding, we lost money on it. That’s when I knew we had to look at doing something different.”

He thought back to summer 1999, when he and three or four other choreographers had hit the road, taking the essence of SYDF activities to different locations. Howitt grins, savouring that success. “We connected with over 600 people, more than we’d ever had participate at any one festival. Local authorities who’d been supportive were more than happy, because there was such good feedback. We saw then how the festival could shift. We started to look at the gaps in provision. Looked at breaking it down into different age groups – under-fives, seven-plus, young teenagers – and focusing on minorities: asylum seekers, teenage girls who might have body-image issues, boys who would just never think of dancing at all. We looked at geographic areas where there was no dance artist there already. And we went out and contacted the big organisations – Sports Scotland, the health departments and education authorities – who could recognise our vision and be keen to support it.”

You could sum it up by saying that Ydance always manages to be one step ahead. Knowing that many schools struggle to deliver the Higher dance curriculum, Ydance devised Aim Higher, a practical resource and support package now being used in three schools. For 16 to 21-year-olds keen to develop technique, and maybe go into further training, the inhouse brainstorming came up with ProjectY, a performance company that uses the summer months for workshops, rehearsals, live shows and, in recent years, international exchanges with groups in Sweden and Marseille.

Just how special this initiative is can best be told by one of the participants, Kathleen Murphy who, come October, will be in Delhi representing Ydance in the handover ceremony at the Commonwealth Games. Four years ago the 16-year-old, who subsequently took a degree in community arts, joined ProjectY without ever having done contemporary dance. That first intensive month of moving in new ways sparked an enthusiasm that brought her back, year-on-year, and will now see her follow up her degree with a post-graduate diploma in community dance at London’s Laban Centre.

Why dance? “Because it can really transform people,” says Murphy. “You can see it happen. They’ve never danced before. You get them involved and it seems to free them up. They change before your very eyes. Get confident in themselves, confident in what they can do and have fun, so much fun, at the same time.”

Meanwhile, back at the Briggait, Howitt and Lappin are revving up their ideas for future projects and collaborations – like the spectacular Tam O’Shanter they did with Scottish Youth Theatre and the National Youth Pipe Band of Scotland.

“We see The Briggait as a chance to take all the expertise we’ve gained in new, forward-looking directions,” says Howitt, “but the basic belief doesn’t change. Dance is all about being alive. We just want as many young people as possible to find that out for themselves.”