Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth & Phantom
Choreographer Holly Blakey delves into the deeply personal and universal experience of loss and reinvention in the UK premiere of a double bill of new dance works.
Acclaimed choreographer Holly Blakey’s new double bill is her most ambitious work to date, taking her choreography to a new level of intensity, intimacy and international visibility. It features an expansion of her 2021 work Phantom, and A Wound with Teeth, the first section of Holly Blakey’s new full-length work Lo, which premieres in 2026.
Both works develop Blakey’s fascination with social and folk dance forms, which began with her use of line dance in the Cowpuncher series and continues into Phantom and Lo with exploration of collective responsibility and euphoria through this form.
For the first time, they both begin from a highly personal place and are developed through close collaboration with the dancers, drawing on their own experiences of grief and estrangement on the one hand, and pleasure and self-assertion on the other.
A Wound with Teeth:
How can loss of memory be a site of potential? In this excerpt from the new full-length work, Lo, Blakey uses her own experience of forgetting to create a work that questions our ability to remember, and also to imagine and invent, at the border of the rational and the irrational. In a world that is sometimes terrifying and perverse, fighting for our own survival also means creating stories, and our own monsters and beasts.
Phantom:
Carried by ten dancers engaged in a choreography on the verge of ritual, Holly Blakey explores with tenderness, honesty and strength a particularly painful episode of her personal journey: her miscarriage. In collaboration with Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena, creators of the Chopova Lowena brand and on a composition by the musician Gwilym Gold.
Credits
Holly Blakey director and choreographer
Gwilym Gold music
Chester Hayes, Grace Jabbari, Liana Kleinman, Sari Mizoe, Elisabeth Mulenga, Luigi Nardone, Moronfoluwa Odimayo, Violet Savage, Naomi Weijand, Fenglin Yang dancers
Joshie Harriette lighting
Matthew Josephs with archival pieces by Chopova Lowena (Phantom) costumes and styling
Sharia Johnson rehearsal director
Metal & Water lead performance and tour production
Ben Totty, BOX Artist Management talent manager and executive producer
Supported by the Southbank Centre
Need to know
This performance features haze and strobe lighting.
For your visit
This event is held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall Southbank Centre
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