Holly Blakey: 'I'm not trying to shock anyone'

Holly Blakey isn’t afraid to fail. In fact, in this perfection-obsessed era, where, she says, you’re expected to ‘achieve; look wonderful as you’re doing it; and be a great fucking mother too’ – the contemporary dance choreographer thinks it’s actually far more interesting to show people your mess ups. ‘It’s aiming to do something and then allowing the failure to be the idea.’

Her forthcoming work, Lo, is a testament to that. Set to debut in 2026, with a preview of one section, A Wound With Teeth, here at the Southbank Centre in April 2025, the performance was originally conceived as an exploration of the year she spent at a mental health facility in Manchester as a child – a period she had blocked from her memory.

‘I got all my medical history and found out crazy information,’ she says of researching it. ‘I connected with patients, medical staff. It was actually very traumatic. It made me really ill.’ And so instead of forcing herself further into that darkness, she embraced the idea that ‘my body had let me forget’, ditched the original concept and created something entirely different: a self-penned nursery rhyme about healing; drawing on British folk traditions like Morris dancing, and costumed like a fantastical school play – complete with papier-mâché monsters. 

Blakey has always been an original thinker. Born in Harrogate, she spent her childhood moving around across both sides of the Pennines. Her biological father was an artist, but she grew up with her mother and her stepfather, and though neither worked in creative industries, Blakey describes her upbringing as full of curiosity; ‘seeing why life sparkles, if you just look at it in the right way.’ The perspective still shapes her work today. She finds inspiration in the day-to-day – ‘the way people rush onto a train, the way a child pets a dog, the way someone unwraps a sandwich. The tiny romances of life.’

Blakey fell in love with dance thanks to an Anna Pavlova ballet book she had as a child. By her teenage years she had transitioned from ballet to contemporary, dreaming of attending one of the country’s top schools. But when she was hospitalised for her mental illness, she was no longer allowed to perform. ‘That was a big incentive for me to get out and get well,’ she says. ‘And when I did, I didn’t get into any of the schools I wanted. I used that as another stick to beat myself with.’ She pauses. ‘Now, I think it was the most amazing blessing. It gave me a real chip on my shoulder – and that drove me to doing what I wanted to do.’

Jessie Ware’s tension-filled ‘Night Light’ music video was her big break. She choreographed it after studying contemporary dance at Roehampton University. ‘Jessie didn’t ask me to do any others afterwards and I thought, ‘fuck this’,’ says Blakey. Determined, she looked up Ware’s next choreographer and realised they had an agent. ‘So then I started messaging loads of agents. And they were like, ‘Who are you?’ And then I got in touch with one, and I just lied through my teeth, said I’d done all this stuff. And they said, ‘Alright, have a meeting with us.’’ It paid off. Blakey quickly became one of the most sought-after music video choreographers in the UK. She won a UK Music Video Award for the feral movement she developed for Florence + The Machine’s ‘Delilah’. She was even tasked by Chris Martin to help him improve his movement when he performed on stage with Coldplay.

 Those moments are often drawn from social dance, the folk traditions and rituals, like line dancing, maypoles and Morris dancing, that have helped people find community for hundreds of years – something that Blakey’s been drawn to since her days raving in the countryside as a teenager. ‘I think a lot of it comes from not really understanding where I’m from or where my home is,’ she says, of her interest in it, ‘knowing that, actually, in a sort of somatic, choreographic, embodied practice, I’m at home.’

That said, her work is also often a Trojan Horse; an exploration of prejudices placed upon society – or her individually – packaged up in bright, playful movement. Take the Cowpuncher series, which she debuted part one of in 2018. ‘Originally it was asking ‘What does a cowboy boot do to a foot?’ How can a cowboy be both so macho and so camp? I read a statistic that horses were more prevalent in Spaghetti Westerns than women. Then I realised, as with many things, there’s loads of problems with them, loads of racism,  sexism, and issues of land ownership. It became this really difficult thing that I felt I needed to do justice to.’ The follow ups, Cowpuncher My Ass and Cowpuncher 3, added another layer of exploration. Blakey took inspiration from critical reviews the first received – that said that her representation oversimplified the nuances of frontier life – creating the pieces in conversation with those takes. In the finale, the orchestra push the cast off the stage, she tells me, with ‘shrieking, agonizing’ string music. ‘That was the music saying you didn’t succeed and you failed.’

It’s one reason why she’d like to see a greater diversity of choreographers commissioned by institutions. ‘I see amazing work from other women, and non-binary choreographers, like Becky Namgauds, Darcy Wallace, Eve Stainton to name just a few… the impact is so significant, yet in terms of funding and presentation opportunity we continue to be superseded by our male counterparts.’ When it comes to her own future, she’s not sure what will come next. She has more courage these days, she says, ‘to live in the ambiguity of life.’

Lo, like the folk dances that inspire it, is evolving in real-time – messy, alive. And for Blakey, that’s exactly the point. ‘You can’t control everything, can you?’ she says. ‘And when you try, it doesn’t always give you what you need anyway.’