DANCE

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BalletBoyz

The BalletBoyz company was founded in 1999 by Michael Nunn and William Trevitt.

Michael Clark

Michael Clark was born on an Aberdeenshire, the son of an alcoholic farmer. When he was aged four, he attended his sister s Scottish country dancing classes. He won a place at the Royal Ballet School. However, he declined to join the Royal Ballet company. Instead, he joined first Ballet Rambert and then the American-based Karole Armitage company.

In 1982 he choreographed his first piece at the Riverside Centre.

In 1984 the Michael Clark Company was launched. The new works that he created included Because We Must and I Am Curious Orange, and Mmm (1992). No Fire Escape In Hell (1986) featured Leigh Bowery wielding a chain saw while wearing shoes with 10in. heels.

In the 1980s Clark created O, a work in which his mother Bessie performed bare-breasted and gave birth to him on stage. She toured with company for two years. His nephew returned from school one day and told him that he had been asked by some of his fellow pupils, Is it true your granny s a stripper and your uncle s a poofter? He replied, Yes, it s true.

In the 1994 he had a breakdown. His drug consumption was large, his friend Leigh Bowery died, and he hand his friend the choreographer Stephen Petronio broke up. Clark found himself unable to finish a piece that he was creating for the Royal Ballet. He disappeared. Rumours circulated that he had died. He had fled back to his mother s home at Cairnbulg near Fraserburgh. He found it relatively easy to wean himself off heroin. However, this left him hooked on methadone, which he found it a lot harder to come off.

A major element in his rehabilitation was taking classes with Richard Glasstone, who had taught him as a child at the Royal Ballet School.

In the early 2000s Clark started working again. Before and After: The Fall featured a large sculpture by Sarah Lucas, who had helped him during the preceding years.

In 2005 he was appointed an artistic associate at the Barbican. Over the following two years he created three new Stravinsky ballets Apollo (O), The Rite of Spring (Mmm...), and Les Noces (I Do). These works were well-received.

Website: www.michaelclarkcompany.com

DV8 Physical Theatre

DV8 Physical Theatre was founded by Lloyd Newson and Nigel Charnock (1960-2012).

Website: https://dv8.co.uk

Lindsay Kemp

Lindsay Kemp (1938-2018) was raised in an impoverished one-parent family in South Shields on Tyneside. He took night classes at Bradford College of Art where he befriended David Hockney. It was the painter who introduced him to ballet by taking him to a performance at Sadler s Wells. He did his national service in the Royal Air Force, where he discovered gay sex. He triggered his dishonourable discharge by appearing on parade with Indian bangles and kohled eyes. He studied dance at Rambert School of Ballet & Contemporary Dance in Notting Hill, where he met Jack The Incredible Orlando Birkett (d.2010), who became his stage partner for over twenty years despite going blind.

Kemp ran foul of Marie Rambert s daughter Angela and was asked to leave. Among the jobs that he applied for subsequently was being the choreographer at a West End strip club. The mime artist Marcel Marceau saw a show that he staged at the Edinburgh Festival and invited him to become his pupil, which he did. He also studied the craft with Hilde Holger. In 1962 he established his own dance company. His skill lay in collaborating with choreographers who were more talented than himself. This caused one critic to comment that commented that he was a man of many talents few of which were his own.

Lindsay Kemp formed his first dance company at The Lyric Hammersmith in 1965. The theatre mounted his first major production Illuminations.

In 1967 a show that he mounted at a theatre in St Martin s Lane featured When I Live My Dream from David Bowie s first album. The singer, who had become deeply disillusioned with the music industry, introduced himself to Kemp and asked him to teach him. The two men became lovers but their relationship fractured when Kemp discovered Bowie in bed with the company s female designer. In 1970 he staged at Edinburgh Festival Our Lady of The Flowers, which was based upon Jean Genet s Notre Dame des Fleurs. The show was well-received. By 1972 he and Bowie were reconciled enough for Kemp to choreograph the Ziggy Stardust performances at The Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park (which Elton John regarded as being too camp). Kemp s reputation grew as the decade progressed.

In 1974 Kemp s Flowers, a pantomime; based upon Jean Genet s Notre Dame des Fleurs, began what proved to be a twenty-year-long world tour. In 1974 Flowers was staged in both London and New York. The production at The Bush Theatre was seen by a young singer called Kate Bush. She promptly signed up for the class that he taught in a school hall in Fulham. He was positively impressed by her and in 1976 offered her a job as a wardrobe mistress, not knowing that she already had a music deal with E.M.I.. In 1977 the Ballet Rambert commissioned him to create Cruel Garden. His subsequent shows included: Pierrot In Turquoise (1967), Salom (1972), Mr Punch s Pantomime (1976), Fa ade (1983), A Midsummer Night s Dream (1984), Onnagata (1991), and Cinderella: A Gothic Operetta (1995). During the 1970s he appeared in a number of movies. These included: Ken Russell s Savage Messiah (1972) and Valentino (1977), Robin Hardy s The Wicker Man (1973), Derek Jarman s Sebastiane (1976), and Jubilee (1978), and the Joan Collins vehicle The Stud (1979). He spent the money from these on costumes, scenery, and cocaine. By 1979 it had become apparent to him that his company was never going to receive a public subsidy, therefore, he went to live in Spain and subsequently based himself in Italy, where he directed a number of opera productions.

Website: www.lindsaykemp.eu

The Laban Centre

Rudolf Laban choreographed the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1938 he fled Germany. In 1948 he and and his fellow refugee Lisa Ullmann founded the Art of Movement Studio in Manchester. It relocated to Addlestone in Surrey.

In 1974 the Laban Centre moved from Surrey to New Cross.

In 1973 Ullmann retired. Marion North (1925-2012), the head of dance at Goldsmiths College, was appointed as her successor. North relocated the Studio to New Cross and renamed it the Laban Centre for Movement & Dance. She switched its emphasis from teacher training to training professional dancers and choreographers. In 1974 Bonnie Bird, a former member dancer with the Martha Graham Company, joined the Centre s staff.

In 1982 North founded the Dance Theatre Journal.

In 2003 the Laban Centre opened in Deptford on part of the royal dockyard. The building had been designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. It houses thirteen dance studios and a 300-seat theatre. The translucent covering was designed in collaboration with the artist Michael Craig-Martin. This led the Centre becoming known locally as rainbow building . The Centre was awarded the R.I.B.A. Stirling Prize for Architecture.

The Centre s alumni include the choreographer Matthew Bourne.

Laban founded ausdruckstanz (expressive Dance).

Website: www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/about-us/facilities/faculty_of-dance www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/about-us/study/dance

'Bullseye' ' Bowen'

When the Laban Institute of Dance & Drama was based in Addlestone its students included one Peter Williams (1937-2018), who, under the stage-name Jim Bowen, became a Northern comedian and presenter of the darts and general knowledge television show Bullseye (1981-95). The programme was not renowned for the hardness of its questions, an example being Who came second in the last war? However, as the presenter admitted The contestants were n t always the brightest tickets - some of their I.Q.s did n t reach room temperature. He once asked Where was President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas? Chicago! came the answer.

Pineapple Dance Studios

Debbie Moore worked as a model. As a result of an under active thyroid she began to put on weight. Her doctor advised her to take up dancing. She attended a local dance centre. This closed. Her response to this was to open her own dance business in a former pineapple warehouse in Covent Garden. This opened in 1979.

Gary Cockerell ran the Floral Street dance centre. From it sprang The Sanctuary, London s first women-only day spa, which opened in 1977 in a former warehouse.

Location: 7 Langley Street, WC2H 9JA (blue, grey)

Website: www.pineapple.uk.com

Cecil Sharp House

Cecil Sharp House in Primrose Hill has three rooms that have spring floors. These can be hired.

Location: 2 Regent s Park Road, NW1 7AY (blue, turquoise)

Website: www.efdss.org/cecil-sharp-house

Peggy Spencer

Peggy Hull (1920-2016) was a native of Bromley. As a girl, she was regarded as being too tall and gawky to be taught to dance. She anticipated spending her working life in local government and possibly having a political career. Politically, she was a Socialist. While still at secretarial college she offered her skills to the Labour M.P. Herbert Morrison. As a teenager she had had no interest in ballroom dancing. However, during the Second World War she found herself in an air-raid shelter beneath a cinema in Sydenham with nothing to do. Like most of the young people around her she found the waiting to be boring. With her was a manual on ballroom dancing. She decided that, despite the fact she had never been to a dance class in her life, she would distract herself and the others about her by teaching them to quickstep and foxtrot. She proved to have a natural facility for doing so and retained her authority by staying at least one page ahead of her pupils. She started to teach dancing in a large room that was attached to a local pub. She found that she had created a business for herself. She taught in village halls in Kent. She arranged her dancers into teams and had them compete against one another in formation dancing contest. It became a national phenomenon and Peggy s teams were the most successful. She viewed herself as being foremost a teacher and was a firm believer in dance for all . She had had ambitions to enter politics. These were put aside.

In an austere post-war Britain ballroom dancing possessed a very real glamour. Women s dancewear bore a definite imprint of the New Look that had been launched in Paris. In 1948 Peggy and her brother-in-law Frank (d.1988) established the Royston Ballroom in Penge. She always maintained that he was a far better dancer than she ever was. The following year the B.B.C. started broadcasting its Coming Dancing ballroom formation dancing programme. Peggy became a commentator on it, while teams that she had trained danced in it. She had a talent for being able to teach formation dancing despite the fact she had never danced in one herself. The advent of rock n roll in the 1950s led to a decline in business for most dance schools. However, the Spencers one had acquired such a reputation was such that its custom remained healthy. That she was open-mindedness with regard to musical forms helped. She choreographed the Your Mother Should Know dance sequence in the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour (1967) film. It was shot with her dancers in an aircraft hangar in West Malling, Kent. Peggy taught the ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev how to tango for his role in Ken Russell s 1977 biopic of Rudolph Valentino.

In 1996 Peggy retired from professional dance coaching. However, she continued to teach into the mid-2010s. The following year she choreographed a show for Elton John s birthday. The guests included the producer Harley Medcalf. He commissioned her to choreograph the Burn The Floor dance show. This toured the world. In 1998 the B.B.C. cancelled Come Dancing.

In 1940 Peggy Hull married Jack Spencer and became Peggy Spencer. The couple had two children but the marriage foundered. The couple divorced in 1947. Her interest in ballroom dancing meant that she had become close to her brother-in-law Frank Spencer, who had been a Word Championship ballroom dancer in the 1930s. Following the end of her marriage she moved in with him. Legally, she could not marry him because his brother was her former husband. The Spencer brothers campaigned for a change in the law. This was brought about in the mid-1960s. Frank and Peggy were the first couple to marry under the new framework.

Location: 12 Percy Road, Penge, SE20 7QJ

Royston Hall, 85 Royston Road, SE20 7QW

Website: www.bishopsgate.org.uk/collections/spencer-margaret-ann www.bishopsgate.org.uk/stories/peggy-spencer

David Backhouse 2024