UK Dance and why it has failed to develop in the last 30 years.

British Dance – How we got here from there….

The 1970’s and 1980’s was a thin time for serious professional classical dance in the UK.

In the 60’s Nuryev and his ilk delivered a galvanic kick in the arse as they hurdled immigration barriers across the free world.

Despite their avowed desire for creative freedom it was actually the ever expanding opportunities to earn top-capitalist wedge and escape Shitstreetsky housing projects which really drove them. However, they brought a new athleticism and balls to the effete and dusty corners of the capitalist Opera Houses, all the while humming the freedom songs of the revolting bourgeois capitalist students.

Newly available videos of the work that continued behind the Iron Curtain during this period clearly demonstrates there was plenty of innovation happening there all the while. It was just harder and more dangerous to attempt and carry off.

Courtesy of their new found notoriety, the big, stellar fees that could be commanded by this group of elite dancers, and increasingly their colleague designers, film-opera directors and choreographers began to match the already monstrous demands made by the opera divas and their agents in the internationl Opera House circuit. The golden egg laying goose began to look increasingly sickly.

This drain on available resources inevitably reduced interesting, innovative creative decision making, to desperate fiscal strategising on how to avoid ever widening funding black holes. These self-defeating processes by default were still presided over by an immovable old-guard of ancient eminences grises headed by the redoubtable, the fearsome and the controlling of the Ninette de Valois type, sundry other superannuated Dames and Sirs and The Board of the ROH, made up as it was by Establishment Pillars, eminent bankers and the grand Ladies Who Lunched.

A group no matter how well intentioned, whose collective mindset was not exactly welded to the pulse of contemporary culture, and certainly not to any kind of notion that great art might require a modicum of innovative thinking, new blood and actual involvement with the real world to evolve.
There was also a marked tendency by this elite to regard Covent Garden - jewel in the crown of United Kingdom Arts Subsidy - as their personal advertising hoarding and networking club.

On careful examination this situation continues to exist in only a slightly moderated form to the present day.

While Ashton and Macmillan et al, were busy being funded, garlanded and wined and dined around the world by the grateful British Tax-payer, their hegemony was also holding back the best of the incoming influences from the places in which they would be most noticed.

Furthermore there seemd an almost quixotic resistance to any requirement to look with particular care and attention at what was happening in Europe, where the scene was certainly a great deal more eclectic, democratic and far less class and caste bound.

As with all great avant-garde, the word on the street about the work of the dance pioneers, Dunham, Graham, de Mille, the glamorous and better paid upscale showgirl offshoots Robbins, Fosse, Ailey, Artie Zane and Bill T Jones who bridged the gap between Opera House, street dance and variety halls and the edgy neo-classical and dance-theatre practitioners on mainland Europe, Cranko, Neumeier, Bejart(at a stretch), Ek, Kylian, Forsyth, Bausch et al.
All of these influences were also beginning to filter into the Britdance consciousness.

This gave grist to an ever busier mill, kick-started in particular by the London based Graham offshoot Robin Howard funded and Bob Cohan founded, London Contemporary Dance Theatre.

Meanwhile Marie Rambert with the prescience and freedom to move not enjoyed by The Louis Quatorze Appreciation Society staggering from lunches to loges in Covent Garden, nodded through her blessing for "Ballet" Rambert, strategically to transform itself from a classical dance based company to a more “contemporary” modern dance, plain "Rambert" oriented programme under Glen Tetley and Christopher Bruce and attract ever more knowledgeable and appreciative dance afficionados into the bargain.

Scratch a Duarto, or a Hechter and it will reveal a strong Tetley, Bruce, Kylian, Ek colour beneath.

Owing to the increasing number of imported stars, talented and ambitious homegrown dancers experienced less and less career promotion opportunities within the Big Ballet companies. Ennui and frustration began to set in at the grass roots. Children of the RBS, grew up, graduated and got sucked into the machinery of the old Warhorse companies where opportunities for creative development were limited and closing.

All around them, their colleagues and co-graduates were getting into LCDC, Rambert, the myriad other offshoot dance companies in Europe and occasionally the US and heavens preserve us, even musicals!
These new dance directions stretched their phenomenally well-trained bodies and technical abilities and rumour had it, even offered some autonomy over the the way in which they shaped their careers.

This in turn engendered the phenomenon of remarkable UK talents beginning to emerge with something to say and the attitude and resources to stick two fingers up to the Establishment.
Michael Clark cut the arse out of his costumes, put some of the Opera House ballet stars in them, blew a big raspberry at the Culture Poobahs and so, as they say in street parlance, it kicked-off.

Initially this was to the benefit of the contemporary dance scene, which in terms of dancers and choreographic output went from strength to strength with original and daring developments appearing weekly. These were the best years of the Rambert Company, the output from the more gifted disciples of Bob Cohan, the London Contemporary dance School graduates under Jane Dudley, some of the less vain and pretentious moments of the DV8 ouput, and a burgeoning number of British Contemporary Dance Theatre professional dancer/choreographers and of course, The Dance Umbrella.

Gradually, bright and increasingly well-informed dancers worked out that there was a great more work for them if they were to either concentrate on musical theatre dance or gravitate to one of the contemporary dance based programmes. These had begun to proliferate, as the first wave of UK contemporary /modern dancers were coming to the end of their useful dancing lives and beginning to get into teaching and lobbying the educational establishment to bestow Ologies with which to acknowledge their programmes.

It was during this period, that one of the most promising, yet paradoxically, most damaging events that happened to UK modern dance development became gratis of the success of aforementioned Umbrella.
Val Bourne, that most canny of dance promotion trends analysts, gave London and eventually a much wider dance audience flashes of the brilliant potential inherent in dance from all ends of the ‘serious” dance spectrum.

She and the visiting dance makers her festival promoted, inspired a whole gamut of British choreographers to get involved, get funded and get busy. In turn, and not necessarily all to the good of the whole, this motivated our still as yet immature UK dance-makers to invent far more product than the still relatively undeveloped national dance audience could handle.

This opened Pandora's box engendering an increasingly self-justifying "Arts Industry" dedicated to the funding, administration, marketing and creation of ever less forgivable pretexts to make more and more noise about frankly increasingly sub-standard Dance, Moving Image and other "choreographic" output.

All of this, up to the present day, justified the creation and ongoing maintenance of a veritable conveyor-belt of choreo/moving-image output and the proliferation of less focused university study. Thus began the inexorable rise of the graduate programmes of Laban, Middlesex University, Bretton Hall, Dartington, Roehampton etc,.

These college based "dance" courses shove targetted numbers of "dance" graduates into an unkind world, blinking and shivering with an Ology, MA, Bsc and in occasional cases even PhDs clutched in their mitts.

While in no way decrying an acknowledged ongoing requirement for teachers of dancing to encourage our increasingly obese children to move their bodies around school gyms twice a week, there is now a pressing need for a radical shake-up of the "professional" dance education programmes in the UK.

While in no way underestimating the value and importance in developing youthful aspirant ambition and skills, as far as dancers are concerned, somehow there needs to be a method by which effective identification of "the right stuff" as far as the pre-requisite physique, skills and mindset to go on to be the next generation of dancers and dance makers is concerned. We must also bend to the task of providing a much more radical approach to the right kind of teaching and pedagogic skills to coach them.

These need to be far more clearly delineated and developed along a totally different line from the rest of the dance education programmes which should increasingly be regarded and as offshoot of a wider and more academically focused physical education programmes. We are creating the next generation of PE teachers with useful information on nutrition and sports science. Should we encourage everyone to call themselves professional dancers?

At the same time, archaic and moribund organisations like The Royal Academy of Dancing, the ISTD and all of the other anachronistic "syllabus" led dance organisations should be put firmly under Ofsted reviews and required to come up with anatomically, commercially and contemporarily sound justification as to why their tired and outmoded approaches to developing dancers and more importantly dance teachers should continue to be regarded as adequate or remotely relevant in the 21st century world of dance-science.

On the basis that “a little learning is a dangerous thing” the current mish mash allows for and encourages significant numbers of arrivistes and pretenders to choreographic innovation. Courtesy of the wonders of natural selection most of these fall by the wayside, but often not before they have applied for, been granted and used up vast amounts of the ever more scarce Arts Funding resources which could be put to far more effective use.

Too many of the modern UK dance makers have actually mastered the black-arts of hanging onto the greasy pole of Arts funding and have gone on to become veritable pillars of the dance establishment.
On the basis of the one-eyed in the kingdom of the seriously visually impaired, many of these or their followers, now get to set the agenda for much of what has come to pass for dance "innovation" in the United Kingdom.

Much of the above sheds light on why as far as Europe and much if the USA is concerned, there is evidently very little in the way of new dance activity, choreographic innovation or ground to break which might inspire any of the best dancers from the rest of the world to even consider coming to work here.

More difficult for the home-grown "serious" dance students.
If they are not addicted to celebrity cults, the increasingly lightweight musical theatre (cruise-dancer training centre) colleges, or the appalling facilities, insane cost and sub-standard teaching of the "professional" open classes in our so-called Dance Centres, they are continually forced to scurry abroad to work and train as soon as they can.

Our dancers and the level of expertise they show are the envy of the world. Imagine what the UK might achieve if it had training programmes worthy of their potential.