Holly Blakey doesn’t care if her work makes you uncomfortable

Holly Blakey’s latest piece is full of audacious dancers. I meet the Harrogate director and award-winning choreographer on a Saturday morning at the Southbank Centre, where the first dress rehearsal for A Wound With Teeth is taking place – one of two double bill performances conceived by Blakey and set to hit the central London theatre tonight and tomorrow. The second, Phantom, will be familiar to some who have been closely following Blakey’s work: a performance that was originally conceived for the stage, it was turned into a short film in 2020 (a casualty of the pandemic). Now, it’s finally getting a chance to be seen as it was intended.

If you haven’t heard of Blakey, you might’ve seen her work in some of your favourite musicians’ music videos. She’s worked with Rosalía, Jorja Smith and Harry Styles to name just a few, a trajectory that’s seen Blakey become one of London’s leading choreographers. In 2018, she put on Cowpuncher, a subversive dance piece about cowboys, masculinity and gender, which thrust Blakey into the theatre world’s spotlight (it did so well that audiences were treated to a sequel, Cowpuncher My Ass).

The first iteration of her pandemic piece Phantom, meanwhile, was a very personal one. Inspired by a miscarriage that Blakey experienced, it put her directly in the firing line. ​“Phantom had a lot of impact. A lot of people had a lot to say about it,” she says matter-of-factly, sitting in an empty chair in the theatre. ​“Some people hated it, some people loved it. And that’s quite common for me – sitting in that high tension zone.”

Just one week after losing her pregnancy, Blakey put together the slow-building, climactic short film, which featured dancers moving in tandem to form a ritualistic dance, exorcising feelings of loss and transformation. “‘This is appalling! What an awful idea!’” were just some of the comments left on the video, as Blakey told The Guardian in 2023.

In spite of this, it was important to the choreographer that women’s emotions be laid bare on stage. ​“Sometimes my stuff has a crassness about it that feels untamed, and I think that can be confronting. People are confronted by seeing lots of women in these moments of pain and pleasure.”

This month, Blakey is unleashing some more thought-provoking stuff on the world. A Wound With Teeth recounts an emotive story through the use of eerie nursery rhymes, high-octane outfits and folk tales. Backstage, things get cramped as dancers lounge on a sofa, while others flit in and out of the brightly-lit toilets to eye up their costumes. Cast member Violet awaits her cue in a patchwork dress made from vintage kids’ blankets shielding her entire body, her face peaking through the costume.

In the corner, another dancer, Elizabeth, puts on a pair of freakishly long black gloves with bulbous fingertips, a present by Welsh designer Paolo Carzana to the head of costume, Matthew Josephs – the stylist and creative director known for steering much of FKA twigs’ creative and working with photographers including Harley Weir and Alasdair McLellan. On a table lie two comically large paper mache heads: a horse and a dragon, both with eyes made out of spoons and plastic jagged teeth. Not your average dance props, eh?

Blakey, her tumbling dark hair tucked behind her ears, is wearing a black Stella McCartney bodysuit, dark joggers, a Nike hoodie and lavender Puma Mostros. She sticks out like a sore thumb against her backdrop of kaleidoscopically dressed dancers.

On stage, the scenes she has choreographed are equally captivating. Luigi and Chester, two members of her 10-person dance troupe, hit the stage first. Acrobatic in their movements and gracefully in sync, they lock into a mesmerising dance of Irish and folk moves, turning into a blur of bonnets, groin guards, speckled Victorian frocks and animal printed coats. It’s easy to assume that A Wound With Teeth, with all its eccentric costuming and striking props, was derived from a place of joy, but you’d be wrong.

What started as a commission two years ago from the Manchester International Festival, ended up forcing Blakey to relive childhood memories of her stint at a mental health facility in the city. ​“I was trying to do anything but think about that,” she says of the experience. Now based in London, Blakey’s time as an inpatient was something she blocked out of her mind entirely, but there was something niggling at her to unpack the experience.

​“I had so much memory loss around it. So I was like, okay, this could be a really interesting site of potential [for a piece].” Determined to mine something from the ordeal, Blakey sought out a therapist, spoke to nurses at the hospital she stayed at and studied her medical papers. ​“I found out things that I just couldn’t quite believe about my experience [there]. It made me really poorly and I thought, what am I doing?”

Reimagining nursery rhymes quickly became a balm for Blakey, and her entry point into conjuring A Wound With Teeth. She embraced the darkness and began penning her lyrics, inspired by Irish folklore and the Greek myth of Medea – one of her six year old son’s favourites.

“I just wanted to write a really crass, childlike nursery rhyme about healing that will hopefully feel like a collective experience,” she says. Numerous nights spent reading her son’s book of myths sparked more ideas. ​“We’re both fascinated by myths like La Llorona, a Mexican folk tale. It’s about a woman, a ghost, who drowns her children in a rage and walks around Mexico screaming for them, because she realises what she’s done and can’t get over the trauma.”

Having such a tight-knit cast to bring her vision to life has ensured Blakey’s been able to process the gamut of her emotions with little judgement. That’s what happens when you curate your circle with a bunch of dancers you’ve known for more than a decade. ​“I feel really emotional,” she sighs, looking out onto the empty stage.Sharia Johnson, her rehearsal director, has been her rock. ​“She holds everything down. Some of [the dancers] I’ve been working with since they were 19, and we’ve been through so much together as people. The work that we’ve made, it has this depth to it [that] you can’t have if you’ve just met someone – there’s a deeper sense of understanding and knowing within it.”

Matthew Josephs knows this all too well, having met Blakey while hopping from one sweaty East London club to the next many years ago. Soon enough, they became firm pals. ​“Cowpuncher came out when we met and I wanted to see it but didn’t get to,” he says. ​“I remember wishing to work on something like that.”

A Wound With Teeth, then, was fated for Matthew, who already owned stacks of kid’s books: ​“some of them were Edwardian, some from the ​’70s, and The Hungry Caterpillar”. He and Blakey, then, began to flesh out the costumes. Josephs raided the Women’s History Museum in New York and Traid in Dalston. Moodboards, meanwhile, don’t exist in Matthew’s world. It’s all instinct. ​“I hate making moodboards. I’ve been really lucky with Holly. She just kind of trusted me to go for it.”

What exactly does going for it mean? Think: a head-turning padded bedsheet dress, or ​“a historical BBL,” as Josephs puts it. ​“The world is horrible right now, and we need some fantasy – that’s what fashion and costumes are about.”

As Blakey gets comfortable in the empty theatre, the cast long gone for lunch, two things become clear: she won’t compromise on her vision no matter how painful the topic. See: Phantom, which, of course, comes from a place of pain and honesty.

Costuming for this piece is its own magnificent journey: led by Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena-Irons of cult London brand Chopova Lowena, this collab has been brewing for a minute. ​“We’re big fans of Holly,” Chopova says. ​“She was in our SS20 campaign about roller derby girls. There’s an almost ritualistic, cult‑y, animalistic quality to her work. She’s the only thing in the dance world that’s ever truly been inspiring to me.”

Blakey, despite the somewhat taboo nature of her pieces, is determined to spread a sense of happiness through her work (even if only for an hour and some change) – something we could all use a little more of in the wake of non-stop horrific headlines. ​“The stories unearthed [in these pieces] are hard. But we have to see the joy, because it’s a fucking hard time to be alive.”

A Wound With Teeth and Phantom will be showing at the Southbank Theatre on 9^th and 10^th April. Tickets are available here