Holly Blakey On Dance, Identity, and the Beauty of Failure

Holly Blakey moves between creative worlds but choreography is at the heart of all of these. Spanning live performance, film, and fashion, she blurs these with a signature intensity and genuine love and passion for her craft. She returns to the Southbank Centre with a double-bill of her UK premiere of Phantom and A Wound With Teeth (Wed 9 - Fri 11 April); an ambitious and deeply intimate emotional exploration of loss, memory, and social/folk dance. In this conversation, Blakey reflects on her choreographic path: from ballet to rave culture. She discusses the power of failure, the urgency of highlighting women’s agency in today’s cultural landscape, and the importance of under-represented voices being given space to express themselves.

Just to begin for any readers who are unfamiliar, your work is so interdisciplinary and cross-cultural encompassing many different spaces in dance/choreography, how do you define yourself across these different creative mediums of film, fashion, and live performance? 

I just very much consider myself a choreographer and to whichever context that’s existing in, I’m still operating through the same integrity and that doesn’t really change. Wherever I am in my work, I go from the same place. Getting to work across different creative fields just means I get to keep things interesting. The way things sit inside of themselves however are core to what the identity of something really is - what comes before and after. I enjoy playing with context a-lot and then asking questions about it. 

And then, in considering yourself a choreographer, what drew you to choreography? 

When I started dancing really young when I was three, I did ballet, and then I went through a very strange route in my life that led me to many different places and then into making music videos. 

Did you always know that movement and the body would be your medium to create? 

Yes, I’ve never done anything else. I mean I’ve done a thousand bar jobs but I’ve only had one vocation that I’ve continually done my whole life. I’m sure many people say this, but it calls you in and you don’t really have a choice I feel. And certainly, with an embodied practice, you’re situating it at home and you’re finding ways to articulate things from the very centre of who you are. It’s why I always call myself a choreography because I think that it can just mean so many things. I love the sense of not caging down styles or titles and exploring that sense of potential of what choreographers and dancers can be. 

You mention ballet but also raving being some of your formative experiences of dance and there’s an interplay there between high and low culture. When you were starting out, was it rarer to find this interplay, and did this exposure influence your unique artistic identity?

I guess before that it was a more normative contemporary dance route, freelancing, and working for companies. I then began to question who held what value and to who? - Who’s buying it? What is it they’re buying and where? I was really interested in that dynamic and it goes back to context again. The first show I made Some Greater Class was very much about that there’s always a buyer and there’s always someone you’re selling to. I’m talking 15 years ago though now - people would always do commercial work in choreography but they kept it quiet most of the time. I suppose whilst questioning these things and working in this context there was interplay and a little conversation across all the sides of my practice in film, fashion, and stage. 

You’ve choreographed for quite a few prominent cultural figures, is it different at all having to navigate these layers of cultural imagination in choreographing for someone who is already in the public mind? 

Well, I think you just have to totally negate all of that and just do you. You can’t be too conscious around these things. Whilst other structures might already be there, they’re already there anyway, it’s about not being inhibited by these. It doesn’t mean you’re not sensitive to who the person is - you should be curious about what’s exciting to them and also flexible to translate your ideas through to them. It comes down a bit, however, to just not worrying too much about what others think. 

Shifting to your most recent projects, one which is being re-staged: Phantom and A Wound with Teeth, would you mind just sharing a bit about those? 

Yes, so Phantom I made in 2019 which was for ‘Edge’ (a postgraduate dance company from London Contemporary Dance School). Because of Covid, however, it didn’t tour so we made a film of it with Fact magazine. The film became very vibrant and I had quite a lot of energy around it. A lot of people wanted to see the work so we decided to restage it with my dancers rather than the company it was commissioned on. Whilst we have done some shows, this restaging fits the new cast and it’s very of now to me. A Wound with Teeth is an excerpt from a larger work I’ve been developing for the last five years. There are two different works inside this double bill but they have sense to one another as two little angles, side-by-side. 

Phantom is obviously a very personal piece, how did you navigate making that? 

I’ve never made autobiographical work before. Of course, in some ways, everything is autobiographical. It wasn’t my intention, however, for the work to be so specific to my experience of miscarriage. But, I think in a practice which is totally embodied, I did wonder initially how I was going to do this back in Covid. Everybody was in masks and there was a grid taped to the floor and everyone had to stay in their squares. I’d never met anyone before and I remember opening up my sketch-book and there was a drawing of an egg, and I decided to just really lean into this experience I had and let the work come to me through that. Before I knew, we were creating this little calling and were thumping into this - calling for something that ultimately doesn’t arrive. It has a ritual about it and it feels like a fertility dance in many ways. There’s a thudding to this piece which teeters on the edge of pleasure and pain and I found this very honest and spontaneous. 

Particularly on the re-staging aspect, what’s it like staging this at a time where women’s bodies and issues are threatened and under so much scrutiny. 

Of course, reimagining this work in the light of Trump and in the light of today where the pendulum has swung back to when I was growing up with such violent and dangerous rhetoric against women’s bodies. I remember the images of these undernourished skinny celebrities and now that’s popular again too, all this is very frightening to me. It goes beyond just how the female body looks, however, and actually into agency and sexual rights and it feels like a very necessary time to have these conversations again. It’s almost disappointing. There’s a real urgency for women to be allowed to be all things: hysterical, noisy, quiet, in pain, in hilarity. We must offer the totality of that range of experience. I’m fully aware I can’t do that in one show but I have a relationship to this and it takes us to collectively be as loud as we can about these different things and create a protest over these in our own spaces.  

In thinking more about ideas about bodies and how they operate in your choreography, how did you use costumes to further embody this experience and really work with materials which are placed on the body but aren’t the body itself? 

They’re really simple. With Phantom, my work stems from ideas of social dancing and folk dancing. This is something that started with my work Cowpuncher and it’s where a lot of my research goes to - why do we dance? It’s hilarious and it’s unanswerable. With the costumes for Phantom, they were made by Chopova Lowena and we were operating in a very similar circumstance. It was very organic and as simple as connecting and asking if we could do something together. For the next iteration of works, I’m working with someone called Matthew Josephs and he’s a really exciting stylist and costume designer. In A Wound with Teeth, he’s making monsters which are very crass and child-like with paper mache heads. These are very simple but it’s all about healing our inner child and connecting with this in others. 

These works really delve into the themes of memory, imagination, and the limits of rationality. What drew you to the interconnectedness of these themes and how they play across the two pieces? 

I think I realised with making Phantom that when I was making myself as open and honest as possible, I was able to create something that excited me more and that people connected with an awful lot. A Wound with Teeth actually began as a research commission from the Manchester International Festival and they wanted me to really engage with Manchester. But, to really engage, I really had to think about how I could position myself there and create something from my own experience. As a child I was hospitalised in Manchester where I was taken out of school and moved to Salford. Much like Phantom, wanted to try again to create something intensely personal. 

Holly Blakey: Phantom & A Wound With Teeth. Image credit: Natasha Back.

How did you go about excavating these quite intense and emotional memories again, and what was the outcome of this? 

I realised that I had no memory of my time there and I wanted to dig into what I saw as a great site of potential to really create something glorious. I found all my old medical history, spoke to hospital staff, connected with old nurses, and other kids I was in there with. It was so dangerous and it actually made me really unwell, I didn’t take care of myself at all despite having therapy alongside this research. I realised, however, what a glorious thing it was in fact to fail and that I want to continue to fail. I wanted to write a nursery rhyme and in doing so heal my inner child. In all of my research, what struck me was the littleness of it all, that this very enormous event that happened to me was actually very messy, small, and insignificant. Sometimes that is the most painful part. I started to write this nursery rhyme and build something very crass and childlike, that was based on familiar nursery rhymes -  really playing on my research on folkloric and social dancing and the fact we don’t always know how these things emerged. 

What are the central philosophies inherent to your work, what do you want people to take away when seeing these pieces? 

I’m interested in this thing of just continuing to fail and letting failing be enough. It’s glorious. And, if we could celebrate that more in one another perhaps we would have more love and more growth. I don’t mean growth from a political perspective but growth as in real communal and personal growth. These works might be about me but they are not exclusive to my experience at all. I’m hoping that through presenting these, we can connect with one another and help each-other. 

Particularly as these pieces are all based around different times in your life, how does your work play with time, particularly in choreographing something that’s for the future as well as the present? 

You have to always be moving and changing as often you’’re booking shows a year, two years in advance. You have to always remain porous and honest. Looking back at my work Cowpuncher, I did that for five years in different variations and I had to continually re-imagine how the piece sat in contemporary culture. I knew that I wasn’t finished yet. In the finale of Cowpuncher My Ass, the orchestra pushed the dancers of the stage. In the end, they failed. I’ve always wanted to be open about allowing for my works to be reimagined and to breathe differently. We should always be allowing for the work to serve where we are, not for the servicing of institutions. 

Looking to the future, what do you feel your industry needs more of right now? 

There needs to be more space for female choreographers. I see too often our male counterparts superseding too many talented women I feel. When I say women, I’m not only talking about women but those who aren’t the straight white man. There needs to be a way we can support women who want to start families and also be in this career. We need more mid-career female artists, we need more artists who are not as visible and maybe just starting out.

How do you navigate the future of dance where so much of it has shifted online on social media, dance a-lot of the time has been reduced to viral moments? 

I don’t worry about it. I don’t go on TikTok because I just haven’t yet and it doesn’t interest me. I worry about my own work and I feel liberated from these things. I enjoy looking at Instagram and seeing things but you’re not going to find your heart and soul there - I’m not looking for it there though. 

To wrap up, what excites you about the future of choreography or your own work? 

I’m really excited about the full length work Lo, from which A Wound with Teeth derives, being realised. My son titled this work and has been a real guiding force throughout it with how the nursery rhymes and monsters have unfolded. It’s been super fun and the collaboration with Gwilym Gold on the music has been really exciting. That’s where my focus is now, and making sure I can live well and that those around me live well too - that we all take care of each-other. 

Just to end, what does living well mean to you and how can we all live better?

It means drinking coffee at the right time of the day and drinking enough water. It means having enough time to rest without guilt or shame. It means saying nice things to myself when I look in the mirror, and saying nice things to the people around me. It means watching my son stroke the cat. It means taking care of my neighbours and operating in the world in a healthy and good way. I want to see and do more of that. 

Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth & Phantom plays at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall from 9 - 11 April. Tickets from £22.