Article by:
Kate Hutchinson
Having learned ballet in a car park and given all the right moves to Florence + the Machine. Now, the queen of music videos is putting on her first show. The choreographer talks about dance snobs, anorexia and reclaiming bump ’n’ grind
How things look when it’s 4 am.” This is how Holly Blakey describes her dance style. She uses the line when she’s talking about Florence + the Machine and she uses it when she’s talking about her company of dancers, who are usually writhing in a sinuous tangle of limbs. Watching them is not unlike being in a sweaty nightclub, just before closing time, everything – clothes, inhibitions – just a little undone.
Blakey, 30, is an emerging talent from contemporary dance’s outer edges. But until now, it’s her music video work that’s made the most noise. She has choreographed for Coldplay, Jungle, Everything Everything and Ellie Goulding. The Delilah video she made with Florence Welch won the 2016 UK Music Video award for best choreography and was nominated for an MTV Video Music award alongside Beyoncé and Missy Elliott.
Her first full-length show, Some Greater Class, however, aims to steamroll the divisions between pop culture and the arts. “I loved pop videos. I never gave a shit about whether they were deemed ‘proper’ art or not,” says Blakey. “I never approached my practice any differently. But my peers did. Everything I did in that realm began to hold way less value. After that, I started asking, why is everything so elitist? Why are we artists if we’re not trying to speak to everybody? I realised this is all bullshit: these people only make work for each other.”
Born in Yorkshire, Blakey grew up in the Lake District where she took ballet lessons in “a little shed in a car park”. Professional pirouetting was all she ever wanted to do, her sights trained on the Royal Ballet, but in the sixth form, her career stalled when she was diagnosed with anorexia.
“You can’t deny the stress the body goes under in strict dance training,” she says. “I wanted to be a dancer, whatever it took. And the thing about anorexia is that you want to be anorexic. You don’t want to just be thin, you want to be as ill as you can. In ballet, it’s so serious. It’s changing, but the anorexia is massive … This super skinny, super [form] is what ballet is … That’s a perverse [pressure] on the body. On the female body.”
Blakey wasn’t allowed to dance during the six months she spent in the hospital, which she says was “the biggest incentive for me to get well”. After she got better, however, she pinged from one unsuccessful ballet audition to the next and, devastated, “stopped dancing for a year or more”. It was her discovery of contemporary dance that changed everything. She joined the youth company at Ludus Dance in Lancashire, “run by these really cool hippies”. Blakey says their less rigid approach was a “liberating experience, where my body was enough, in whatever form”.
Eventually, Blakey got a place on Roehampton University’s dance course. She soon found herself dancing in a music video for the Charlatans, but she didn’t consider choreography until 2012, when she was asked to create a video for Jessie Ware: “I was finally like, ‘Oh wow, this is who I am.’”
Now Blakey is one of the go-to choreographers for anything from alternative pop to the weirder reaches of electronic music (Some Greater Class is soundtracked by Gwilym Gold and Darkstar). She also has a sideline in teaching two-left-footed rock musicians simply how to move. One former client is Coldplay frontman, Chris Martin. Was that a challenge? “He does a lot of yoga, so his body-mind connection is really strong!” she says. The lessons led to her working on the band’s video for Adventure of a Lifetime and Blakey being able to add “choreographing Coldplay as some disco-dancing CGI chimps” to her CV.
Blakey is keen to make dance more accessible. She tends to bypass traditional dance venues, having previously shown her work at art galleries, festivals and even in a live stream on Boiler Room. “We need to be reaching out to people, and not be so intimidating,” she says.
Some Greater Class is certainly not intimidating, but it is confrontational. It plays on what might be perceived as “sexy music video” language by taking it to the extreme: all-grinding, all-grunting, somewhere between arousing and grotesque. In one setup it looks as if a dancer is breastfeeding; another seems to be an act of foreplay. For the most part, she says of internet-consumed music videos, “how we see these things is from a heteronormative, overtly sexualised [perspective], often fetishising young women”.
Blakey says that she’s “interested in having that loud sexuality but in a truer form”. When her two female dancers do a steamy duet, “it’s about how ugly, how unsexy it is. We should be allowed to be all things as women: vulnerable, crazy, sexy, whatever we choose.” She points to Nicki Minaj’s bumtastic Anaconda video as an example of that in-yer-face sexuality that inspires shock and awe in equal measure. Similarly, perhaps, “what’s interesting about seeing that duet is how uncomfortable it can make people when they can’t close it down”.
And Blakey’s punk, 4 am vision of what contemporary dance can be is on the rise. “Young people aren’t obeying the rules anymore,” she says. “The system – of you go here, you train there, you work for a dance company – doesn’t work, unless you’re in that very small minority. So they are making their own work with their own aesthetic. They’re not listening to what they’ve been told.”
Log in with Google