5 minute read
A Class of Her Own
from Crack Issue 89
Sending an electric shock through contemporary dance, Holly Blakey shakes off tradition to close the chasm between pop culture and the arts.
Leotard: Base Range Top: Base Range
Plaid trousers: Marlene Birger
“Do I feel like the dance world has become less snobby?” Choreographer Holly Blakey sits opposite me on the sofa in her living room, considering. She compacts her thoughts, rolling them around her mind like a dancer loosening their hips.
“No. I still feel the same way. There’s a wild, steadfast old snobbery surrounding what dance can be and where it can exist and how,” Blakey answers. “It’s an institutional issue. The same people have been showing in the same spaces for an extremely long time, and the system doesn’t allow for any other form of penetration, in a way.”
Despite her steady rise to the highest levels of contemporary dance, Blakey essentially considers herself a maverick outsider. Fresh from choreographing and directing new show Cowpuncher at the Southbank – with music scored by Oscar-nominated Mica Levi and with costumes designed by Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood – Blakey’s about to start collaborating with über-hip genderqueer fashion collective Art School on a show for Fashion East.
A tongue-in-cheek pastiche of masculinity, Cowpuncher explored gender politics and identity out in the sandy playground of the Wild Wild West, and Blakey will likely tour it in other spaces. Now, Blakey wants to focus on the tomatoes growing in her garden: Cowpuncher was the biggest show of her career, and enormously stressful.
“On the day of the show, I was 100 percent hearing things that weren’t happening,” Blakey explains. “There was this huge amount of pressure and anticipation.” On entering the 916-capacity auditorium, Blakey became tearful. “I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t get anything done for an hour. When you give yourself so completely, and you work night and day on something, and it comes to the moment in which you perform, the feeling is like nothing else I can describe.”
Like birth? I suggest. “Yes,” she affirms. “I was thinking of that, actually.”
Blakey’s big break came in 2012, when she was asked to choreograph the video for Jessie Ware’s song Night Light. “There was no money in it, that age-old thing, but I enjoyed her music and found her inspiring, so I really wanted to do it,” she reminisces. Afterwards, things changed for the classically-trained dancer, who until then had struggled to find her place within the rigid structures of first ballet, and then contemporary dance.
“I suddenly found a place for myself where I wasn’t performing, I was choreographing, and I felt like this was where I sat, after a really long time of not understanding where I belonged,” Blakey explains. “There was a feeling of, this is where I’m supposed to be. That sense of fitting in my own skin was empowering.”
Professional success followed. Blakey choreographed Florence Welsh in a seedy American motel for the awardwinning Delilah video, and changed Coldplay into CGI-generated dancing chimps. She’s collaborated with Hannah Perry to exhibit via Boiler Room, and won funding from Arts Council England to stage live show Some Greater Class in 2015.
Much was made of the overt eroticism of Some Greater Class: Blakey’s company writhed together in a pseudo- Bacchanalian orgy, soundtracked by Gwilym Gold and Darkstar. In press interviews at the time, Blakey emphasised how she’d felt shut out by the contemporary dance world when she began making music videos. But even though Blakey considers herself to be on the fringes of the dance establishment, the very fact that she was one of the first to show in the Southbank’s recently renovated Queen Elizabeth Hall proves that she’s effecting radical change from within.
“It would be better if people allowed dance to become new things,” Blakey muses. “It’s a very old fashioned world. That’s partly why I love dance so much – because of that deeply rooted, strict practice that stems from ballet. But because of that heritage which I value so highly, there’s not much strain from the status quo allowed. We’re still locked in.”
There’s a serenity around Blakey, a composure that reminds me, inexplicably, of a swan-necked debutante in a Regency-era portrait, albeit the tattooed, 2018 version. Her responses to my questions are as precise as a foot turning from first position to second position, a neat swoop outwards in classical ballet style.
She speaks sincerely about the trust she has for her company of dancers, many of whom are gay or queer, and who have been with her over the last six years. “I’m a loyal person,” she explains. “If someone is bringing something to the table, I value that.”
To be a choreographer is a curious thing: you fashion movements that are of you, but give them away, for another to perform. You have ownership over the work, but you give agency to others. “I used to think, why on earth would you choreograph something and give it to another body to have?” Blakey admits. “But I still feel a massive sense of ownership. What’s incredible is that moment just before they perform live, where they’re walking on stage, and you’ve done everything you can, and you really have to just give it away.”
Partly as a result of her music video heritage, and the pelvic rhythms of Some Greater Class, Blakey’s work is often described in terms of its sexuality. Blakey appears frustrated with this labelling. “People always want to talk to me about how sexual the work is,” Blakey says. “Sometimes it is sexual. I’m interested in the idea of pleasure and how sex can be a kind of pleasure that doesn’t have to involve gender or societal norms.” But, she goes on, that’s not always the case. “It is sometimes sexual. But not always in my thinking.”
More than sexuality, she explains, Blakey is interested in the intersection of comfort and discomfort; light and dark; challenge and acceptance. “I always fall on the side of things that challenge me more than they make me feel comfortable,” she explains. “I’m so interested in beauty, but often I look for beauty within darkness, in a different way.”
Post-Cowpuncher, Blakey’s going to pause for a while – and focus on her tomatoes. Whether they ripen, or not, one thing is certain: Holly Blakey will continue to hit whichever mark she chooses.
@Holly_Blakey
Dress: Marta Jakubowksi T-shirt: Aries.
Shoes: Suicoke.
