Sue Coe retired from her role as a Community Education Officer in Oct 2001 and is a qualified teacher with over 20 years teaching experience culminating in the deputy headship of a secondary school. She is now developing her work as a dancer and dance teacher.

Sue has performed and presented workshops in Yorkshire Longsword and Appalachian step dance at various festivals, including Sidmouth, Towersey, Bromyard, Warwick, Cornwall, Dartmoor, Bridgnorth, Broadstairs, Chester, Cleethorpes and Auckland (NZ) and has been a dance tutor at the Redcar & Cleveland Schools Folk Festival for the last 10 years.

She is a founder member of ‘Ryburn Longsword’ who were formed in 1994. The team have made a big impression at International Sword Festivals at Whitby where Sue has taught junior and adult mixed teams. For workshops she provides a large number of wooden practice swords and will introduce a range of basic figures but also encourage groups to experiment and add their own ideas to create a ‘new’ dance. In schools around Redcar she has helped re-introduce traditional Yorkshire Longsword dances into the village schools in Boosbeck and Lingdale.

In 2003 she helped teach and organise a Guinness World Record for Longsword dancing, involving 7 primary schools, 186 dancers and 31 sword locks as part of the Halifax Traditions Festival. She has also joined the rapper team ‘Sharpe Sword’. In July 2003 she worked in a parallel programme of folk dance workshops with Kala Sangam in two Bradford schools, culminating in a celebration day at the Cartwright Hall. In July 2004 & 2005 she taught Longsword and country dancing in schools in Warwick as part of a development project linked to Warwick Folk Festival. In October 2006 she taught Longsword in Loughborough schools as part of the Loughborough Folk Festival Schools Project.

In 2000 she became choreographer to Northern Broadsides Theatre Company, teaching a Longsword dance for their production of ‘The Mysteries’ and an Appalachian routine for their production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. She is also a dance caller, calling most regularly with ‘The Black Box Band’ but has called at Sidmouth and Bridgnorth Festivals with ‘Our Northern Branch’. In Nov 2002, Sue appeared with Alice Jones in ‘Folk at the Fall’ at The South Bank, London dancing to the playing of John Spiers & Jon Boden with Nancy Kerr & James Fagin and in Feb 2006 she appeared in a BBC World television programme on The Cheltenham Folk Festival - dancing to the playing of Pete Coe.