Holly Blakey is a bold and courageous choreographer whose work has been staged across some of the largest dance institutions in the UK and beyond. Based in London, she works across music videos, commercials and conservatoires, slipping artfully over the divisions between high and low, dance and fashion, autobiography and genre. Her dance works for stage are raw and confrontational, drawing on dance styles as diverse as ballet and line dancing, to non-dance sources such as pornography. Each piece develops through intensive rehearsals and in close collaboration with dancers. The results testify to the particular conditions that Blakey creates in those spaces, allowing for intimacy, vulnerability and trust among the cast. The work draws inspiration from personal and collective traumas of the body and soul, as well as opening up a horizon of liberatory joy and pleasure.
Phantom, 2021. Courtesy of Daniele Fummo
Natasha Hoare: I wanted to start by talking about Phantom (2021). Can you elaborate on its development?
Holly Blakey: I’ve worked with the London Contemporary Dance School many times, which is one of the conservatoires in London. I love working with students because I learn a lot, and I love to see where their energy is sitting. 2021 was during the pandemic, and a time when no one was allowed to touch and everyone was wearing masks. I didn’t have any contact with the students prior to the first meeting. Usually, I would hold auditions or castings, or I’d have some kind of familiarity, but there was zero contact this time. Of course, there was this other crucial thing going on, as I’d just had a miscarriage. I was feeling overwhelmed by that experience, and I couldn’t even see these dancers’ faces. They were wearing masks and they were nervous. I didn’t know where to begin. I have a book of symbols to spark simple ideas; it might bring me to an inanimate object, to think about the way it’s used, or perhaps a colour, or a concept like the idea of disease. So I opened this book, and the image that came up was an egg, which I thought was fascinating given the miscarriage I was overcoming. I was still bleeding at the time. It was a very bodily moment. We started making material around this idea of the egg, and I didn’t tell them about the miscarriage until much later, because we didn’t know each other. But as the work was developing, it became the central theme. A lot of my work explores what dance is and where it came from, so it has a folkloric quality. The question of why we dance to music is at its core – it’s charming and humorous. All these things came together to make Phantom. It was a live show that toured in a small way because so many of the theatres shut down because of COVID-19, and we also made a film of it.
Natasha: How would you use the potent symbol of the egg in a setting with dancers? What is your process of development?
Holly: I would talk to them about my interpretation. Read further information to them, and then ask them to spend some time on their own thinking about one or two motifs that might arrive. It could be something physical: the way it cracks, for instance, the way that it pours onto the ground, or the surface of the shell. It could be the way it relates to your body. We might start with improvisation, with our eyes closed after a really rigorous warm-up, and then they just move and think about how this egg is situated in the body, how it articulates and leaves the limbs, the colour and the smell. As you guide them through these improvisations, you see what lands, and I would start to take a little bit of information and ask, well, what happens if we do that but we bring you right downstage? We start to form these little languages or conversations with one another. I keep asking myself how it feels when I watch it, and if I want the tone to have brightness, joy or hilarity. Slowly, slowly we would start to layer the material.
It involves conversations that draw out something from inside the dancers themselves. The other aspect, which is how I often work, is that I create movements that have two layers running alongside each other: one that’s formulaic eight-count choreography, and the other that’s digging into the dancers themselves. We would then start to put them together and see what we find. It becomes all of us.
Natasha: You’ve mentioned a folkloric aspect. What do the folk traditions of the UK mean to you?
Holly: I think about dancing around the maypole at school or even about where all dancing starts, where my dancing heritage comes from. These little folk dances were surely a more common kind of speech once upon a time, like a game or a prayer that everyone would know. I’m curious as to how they’re becoming lost or forgotten, I’m curious about shame.
With folk traditions, it’s very com-plicated – we might look to the work of Cecil Sharp in trying to unpick the Morris dance lineage, but quickly arrive at a gross defensiveness of idea, one that doesn’t acknowledge what may have been learned or stolen from cultures and countries far and wide, what women are and are not allowed to dance, which is often very specifically scripted.
But there is also something in the folkloric that has the potential to hold magic. Maybe it’s something to do with ideas that are bigger than us, the land, the sea, or the sun setting, or the cyclical rhythm of the day that draws me back in. Maybe it has to do with the same few steps holding all of those ideas at exactly the same time.
Natasha: Yes, in Phantom there’s a strong sense of the pagan and fertility dances. It made me think of Beltane festivals in Edinburgh, which are part of the Gaelic May Day where performers dance these erotic and earthy rituals. I was also reminded of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), which draws on similar sources. There are very powerful remnants of pagan culture still present around this country. Is that something you’ve been quoting in the work?
Holly: There is this query around paganism, but also a query around what contemporary dance is to begin with. I try to play with both of those things in tandem. I like to attack prejudices in the tradition of contemporary dance. I started in ballet and then I moved to contemporary dance, but I didn’t go to a conservatoire. I came up through music videos, and I like to exploit what that can mean to people, or perhaps use it to try and disrupt my landscape a bit and ask questions about who’s allowed in. While this pagan theme might feel prevalent in Phantom’s ritualistic nature – and it is – I also want to allow for the language to have something that can be obtained, viewed and accessible to many people, non-exclusive, just as importantly.
…With regard to pornography, I was interested in expressing pleasure and pain at the same time and the energy of the dancers summoning something that never arrives…
Natasha: The work seems to pull in so many different directions stylistically and to draw on many traditions, as well as allow space for non-dance references. Some of the central choreo-graphies in Phantom seem to reference pornography. Was the intention in doing that to make the work as open as possible to audiences? And how disruptive is it to leap over those dividing lines that have been drawn in contemporary dance or historically?
Holly: I would hope that the purpose of contemporary dance is to exhibit all and any ideas that relate to the body and how it moves. When suddenly we are stuck in the idea that contemporary dance is a style, then I guess we have lost its potential. We are just creating new forms of dance with just as restricting, albeit different, rules to the forms that came before where we are now.
With regard to pornography, I was interested in expressing pleasure and pain at the same time and the energy of the dancers summoning something that never arrives. They’re stomping around waiting for something to happen, or trying to bring it to a climax, but it just continues, continues and continues. This was the experience of the miscarriage for me, a calling for something, and it just didn’t come, it felt huge at that moment and then it all just stopped.
Courtesy of Holly Blakey. Photo: Daniele Fummo
Natasha: How do you build that sense of trust within the group? How do you marshal the intra-group dynamic to enable people to be vulnerable and exposed on stage?
Holly: I usually try to make myself as vulnerable as possible first. That might be through sharing something about myself, just taking off all my clothes or barking like a dog.
I feel you have to let things fail and not be afraid of that. There’s a marriage between having people feel held and letting them be vulnerable enough to be as exposed as possible. Because when you witness that in performance, that’s when you find that connection with who’s watching, that’s when you see the moment in which you feel you’re watching yourself. I always want things to feel honest and open. There’s always crying in rehearsals; for some reason, everyone always ends up crying on a Wednesday!
I’m in the process of creating new work, and we made the decision to have a therapist working alongside us. We have group therapy because I realised that I was leaving people wide open and I didn’t have the skills to do that responsibly. I needed to find a way to allow the dancers to feel like they could digest the issues and stories that we were sharing. Talking is really useful.
Natasha: Your most major piece to date, outside of commercials and music videos, is Cowpuncher My Ass (2020), which was staged at the Southbank Centre. It’s a blistering, sensuous, camp tour de force featuring line dancing, with costumes by Vivienne Westwood and music by Mica Levi. How did the concept for that work develop?
Holly: I had done a residency at the Southbank Centre with Mica, and then they asked us if we wanted to make something. I wanted it to be really bright and playful. I was reading a collection of essays about queer dance at the time, and the idea for a Western arose, and I was excited to get a load of cowboys on stage. The first piece in the series, in 2018, was just called Cowpuncher. I quickly realised that when you start to look at this idea of the cowboy the politics are complex. Issues such as land ownership, racism and sexism are ever-present. I read a statistic that horses appear more than women in the spaghetti Western movie genre. On the flip side, there is also the hilarity of the cowboy – an archetypal macho man, with perfect, shiny heeled boots.
The thing about my work is that I get very polarised reviews – the best reviews you’ll ever read and the worst. And it’s very stressful for me! Cowpuncher My Ass, which followed in 2023, was a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the critics, and it allowed us to dig deeper into the concept. The final staging was at the Royal Festival Hall in January 2023, with the London Contemporary Orchestra, a twenty-piece string orchestra, which came on stage wearing full Vivienne Westwood bridal gowns.
Natasha: I’m interested in that mention of queer dance. Can you speak a bit more about that and how it informed the piece?
Holly: I work with people, and I work with them as people. I’m not the type of choreographer who makes lovely clean lines and perfect formations with the same bodies and high legs. I work with diverse bodies, and a lot of the performers are queer or gay. So the work already arrives at this personality without doing much. I question myself about this because I don’t identify as queer. There is also a question about authorship and ownership that can plague me. Am I creating a presentation of something that doesn’t belong to me? The thing is, I believe there is so much value in letting a dancer be more than a vessel, especially coming from a world where men lift women, where heteronormativity is the status quo, even though so many of its members barely subscribe to that idea.
I find joy and humility in the figure of the camp cowboy. He’s a wonderful little object of life; he holds the tension of the way we have to be and the way we actually feel. The flamboyance, the disco and the violence. So many things are held inside this one figure that I wonder if that’s where the queerness really comes from, the revolt.
Natasha: The piece centres on a form of line dancing, which has a very direct relationship to cowboy culture. But there’s a flurry of other languages quoted and inhabited. How did you arrive at each of these?
Holly: I was doing my own version of a line dance, which would start with me watching loads of line dancing and then wondering what it is, where these gestures come from, reorganising that into my own body, and changing its articulation and rhythm. I was interested in the way it might express something exhaustive and broken. I’d teach it to the dancers, and watch it to judge how it read. Then I’d modulate it, and so it went on and on like that. The line dance is a social dance.
I like to play with those things to find out how you can reimagine or better understand them, or perhaps better understand people.
Natasha: Do you think dance is uniquely placed to comment on gender and sexuality?
Holly: I think it’s uniquely placed to comment on anything. It comes without explanation, it doesn’t need to be spoken or written down, or even understood. You know, for me it’s about what is felt – how you do that and what you play around with is up to you. In some ways, I think dance is the only way I understand anything.
…With my new work, I want to arrive at a greater intimacy, I want it to feel personal and closer, so I’m going to do it in the round…
Natasha: What is your consideration of the audience when you are choreographing?
Holly: When you’re in the studio making things, you are very immediate to them. Then when you’re in the theatre, you sit right back and suddenly it is very different. You have to keep tweaking and changing accordingly. With my new work, I want to arrive at a greater intimacy, I want it to feel personal and closer, so I’m going to do it in the round. I’m also using satellite stages that come out into the audience.
Natasha: Whenever I’m watching dance, I find it so captivating to witness the potential of the human body, both for movement and communication. How far do you want your work to be communicative, and how far are you interested in withholding meaning? Does that modulate across a piece, and does that have a relationship to the autobiographical information that you’ve put into a piece as well?
Holly: I love the death of the author! How can you give everything of yourself freely, but also make people look at themselves?
With Cowpuncher, for the first half of the show the house lights were fully up so that you would feel yourself in the room, feel who was sitting next to you, to have a consciousness of watching as well as being watched. The dancers would come to the very front of the stage and look out. In the new show I’m going to push that further in the opposite direction. I’m playing around with seeing less – you might sometimes hear noises and see shadows, but for a while you won’t see anything else. Our imagination, like a child’s, can do so much.
Natasha: What’s your relationship to sensuality and eroticism? The dances read as being fascinated by the energetic charge of the erotic, and how that is linked to driving or bodily freedom. But there’s also an interest in power play, dominance and submission.
Holly: I get excited, and titillated, by certain ideas, and then see how far I can push them. In that evolving scenario I then wonder who holds what power. I’m always having conversations with myself and trying to understand some-thing about myself. I’m interested in power, submission and owning space. Those ideas, which seem quite explicit at first, are simply tools through which to have conversations about being human. Perhaps eroticism and sensuality are my access routes to those ideas.
Natasha: Tell me a bit about the new work.
Holly: The work came from a research and development grant I received from the Manchester International Festival, and I wanted to radically engage with Manchester. My experience of the city was spending time there in a psychiatric unit as a child. I started to research my own experience there, as that whole period of my life has been extinguished from my memory. I engaged with the hospital, had conversations with the nurses, connected with people that I was in the hospital with, and received all of my medical notes.
Sharing all this with the dancers was a very intense process, and I decided that we should work alongside a therapist. The dancers were accessing a lot of traumatic information, so I worried it felt like a burden for them, and I realised after many rehearsals that it was fucking me up, and I wasn’t prepared for it. I decided that my lack of memory around what happened to me during that time could be its own site of potential, that I could rewrite it and create a cover story for myself.
So I’m writing a nursery rhyme for a sense of healing and a search for community through all the loneliness. The show follows four nursery rhymes that are well known in a regurgitated, childlike, crass, messy way, and one that’s brand new and written by me.
There’s this naivety and sweetness that is embraced, and engaging in any more of an autobiographical way was unmanageable. I had been trying for two years, and I just had to fail at that – the failing had to be the point because I wanted to stay well. Instead, I’m remaking the monsters of that time and the monsters inside the dancers, one of whom hangs upside down as a vampire. The nursery rhyme belongs to the home of all of us – it sings us to sleep, sometimes even terrifies us, and so on my expedition of healing it’s children I’m turning to, the ones inside of us all. It’s called A Wound with Teeth.
Natasha: You are very courageous in accessing your own autobiography to inform your work, because it does expose wounds. I wondered how the process of becoming a mother twice over has shifted your sense of a relationship with the body and might have filtered into the work as well.
Holly: Less my body, more my mind. In some senses I care less, because I don’t have time to, and I care so much about something else. My perspective feels different, and I’m more vulnerable than I’ve ever been. I’m more frightened than I’ve ever been. I’m porous, I’m emotional and I’m irrational, and I can hold it down less. For better or worse.
Natasha: You’ve mentioned musician Mica Levi as a collaborator, and music is such an integral part of your work. How do you navigate a collaboration with a musician to build the score for a piece? How does that drive the dancers, as well as having a visceral effect on an audience?
Holly: My closest collaborator musically is my partner Gwilym Gold, who did the music for Phantom and is doing the music for the new show. Often, he’ll send me a loop and I’ll be in the studio on my own and I’ll just work with it. Or he might send me something more structured and then I send him what I’ve made, and then he develops it again. But he would always say he knows something is working when the dancers get it – they go off and crazy and love it so much.
Music is everything. It’s the soundtrack of everything. Why do we have to move our bodies? What is this intrinsic drive – is it the heartbeat? The way it sounds and feels and connects with what’s going on outside of us? I also think that sometimes you want things to resonate, to be joyful. Sometimes we can forget how important it is to just have pleasure as an audience.
Natasha: Does that sense of the importance of pleasure feed into your collaborations with fashion labels?
Holly: Yes. My longest collaboration is with Vivienne Westwood, and we filter in and out of each other’s lives. I do things for them, and they come and do things for me. I was always so interested in how Vivienne would be able to play with our obsessive class structures; you dress up rich, you dress up poor, and you look like a pirate. She was so playful and able to cut through our judgements and prejudices, she owned the female form: big hips, big bodies. Everything they do is all the things I want to try and do in my own work. Andreas Kronthaler is incredible. Vivienne died just before my show, which was so sad. But the guys there are so genuinely wonderful, creative, brilliant people.
Asics x Vivienne Westwood Gel-Kayano 27 LTX, 2021. Courtesy of Holly Blakey. Photo: Daniele Fummo
Natasha: There’s a circling question in your work, a fundamental enquiry into why we dance. Have you come to any conclusion?
Holly: I think we dance to be together. It makes us connect to each other. I think we long for the feeling of connection, to be part of something, a union. Is it a pleasure or is it a necessity? It’s hilarious, actually. If you really think about it, it’s so funny. What are we doing? Why? It’s wonderful.