Talk Art

Season 27 begins! This new season is hosted by Robert Diament.

Robert meets Holly Blakey, one of the foremost choreographers of her generation and one of the few female choreographers in the UK creating large-scale work.

Her practice attends to the honest entanglements of embodied vulnerability, grief, and joy, always rooted in an intersectional feminist frame. Her live performance work has been presented at major cultural institutions Southbank Centre, Hales Gallery and Théâtre National de Chaillot.

As a director and choreographer, she has collaborated with music stars including Robyn (for her new Sexistential album), Rosalía, Harry Styles, Celeste, and Florence + The Machine, alongside visual artists Linder Sterling, Jeremy Deller and Tai Shani,and with fashion houses such as Vivienne Westwood, Burberry and Dior, and in films including Urchin (2025) directed by Harris Dickinson and Harvest directed by Athina Tsangari, interweaving live and commercial contexts, much of her practice often plays on the relationship between these distinct but not wholly separable worlds.

We explore her 2026 collaboration with the Rambert dance company, as well as a new collaboration with artist Tai Shani, her 2025 ambitious double bill (for the Southbank Centre) titled Phantom, and A Wound with Teeth, which took her choreography to a new level of intensity, intimacy and international visibility. Holly Blakey’s new full-length work Lo will premiere 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.

We also learn about her work in film including Harvest (2024) directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, where the entire movie revolved around choregraphy and movement.

Follow @HollyTBlakey and visit https://www.hollyblakey.co.uk/