• Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

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A fun-filled family night of entertainment with dance styles from Street Dance to Contemporary, and Bollywood to Charleston is planned to raise much needed funds to help a family in their battle against a rare fatal disease.

Encore Dance Entertainment and Newcastle Dance Centre (NDC) are teaming up to put on the show with all proceeds going to The Nicole Rich Foundation: a charity set up to support the Rich Sisters, Nicole and Jessica, with their battle against Batten Disease. Before diagnosis, Nicole was an NDC pupil and enjoyed coming to Nursery class and dancing with the other children.

At the age of four years Nicole, from Throckley, was diagnosed with Batten Disease after suffering from Global Developmental Delay, Epilepsy and short stature. Within the same year, her development began to visibly decline, her seizures worsened, she became unsteady on her feet and needed support in drinking and feeding herself.

Batten Disease is an extremely rare fatal neurodegenerative condition for which there is currently no cure. It is expected that Nicole will not survive into her teens.

Dance teacher Gemma Hay, Hayley Conway and the team at NDC decided to organise the show to raise money for the family to help them care for the girls and to raise awareness of this very rare condition.

“We’ve seen at first hand how this cruel disease has affected Nicole and we want to help in whatever way we can. We’ve put together the show to highlight the talents of Encore Dance Entertainment and some of our Senior NDC pupils. Everyone attending will be contributing to a cause very close to our hearts. Nicole and Jessica’s family are working tirelessly to raise money to fund research into treatments and ultimately a cure for this disease,”said Hayley