'It's a game – and you're going to win': the black coaches electrifying dance
Dollie Henry started dancing when she was four and by seven had already moved on to choreography. “I used to take my tape recorder into the playground,” she says proudly, “and teach all my school friends.” By her late teens, she was attending Laine Theatre Arts in Surrey, and beginning to wake up to the implications of being the only black student. “I realised I was going to have problems: one, because I’m black; and two, because I’m a woman. The only way I’ve learned how to deal with it is to be the best you can.”
Henry is still a choreographer but is now also a teacher – and one of three nominees for the award of best teacher of the performing arts at this year’s Black British Theatre awards. The BBTAs celebrate black artists in theatre and dance. Founded by Omar F Okai and Solange Urdang, the awards are one of the only performing arts ceremonies to celebrate educators. “It’s very important for a black student to see a teacher who reflects you,” says Okai. “We want to illuminate these teachers as role models, not just for black students but for all students.” This year’s awards will be hosted at the Young Vic Theatre and aired on Sky Arts.
Now in their second year, the BBTAs were originally sparked by a Facebook post in which an agent had complained that a callout specifically for black actor-musicians was “putting talented ‘white’ performer’s [sic] out of work”. Seeing the post, Okai initiated conversations with various professionals including Urdang, who raised the idea of an awards ceremony specifically to amplify and celebrate black talent. “People talk about [roles going to] the best person for the job,” Okai says. “Well, it can’t be the best one for the job if you won’t let people into the room to be seen. So you have to elevate and illuminate people. That’s what the BBTAs are about.”
All three of this year’s nominees for this category teach dance. Nominated for the second year running, Henry teaches at Trinity Laban and is artistic director of Body of People (BOP) Jazz Theatre Company, both in London. “We’re not recognised in the mainstream,” Henry says. “There are many, many, many of us who have been doing this for years who are excellent at what we do and have the expertise to do it, but we don’t get the call.”
After working in Paris and New York, Henry moved back to Britain. Founding BOP, she says, came from “a need to find a home for jazz” – teaching not just the steps but “the lineage, the context, the history. It’s a black art form that on many levels has been appropriated to make it look like we didn’t exist.” History, she insists, is crucial to every dance. “If you’re doing ragtime you have to bring in the style, the movement and the essence of that into the choreography. If that’s missing, you’ve missed the whole point of what ragtime’s about.”
Fellow nominee David Blake teaches at Wac Arts, London, as well as playing Banzai, one of the principal roles in The Lion King on the West End. Born in Jamaica, Blake moved to New York and later to the UK, where he started teaching the Horton technique, a form of training favoured in American dance schools that takes an anatomical approach to the art form.
“I always tell my students to think of it like going into a game,” Blake says, “and you’re going to win the game. Go in there believing that your talent and gift will make room for you wherever you go.” As extra encouragement, he uses examples of dance pioneers who were discouraged from dancing and fought for their place on stage, people who, he says, “gave opportunities to people like us to step into the room”.
Teachers are often thanked in acceptance speeches, but are rarely given the awards themselves. “You don’t teach to get acknowledgment,” says Kamara Gray, founder of Artistry Youth Dance, a London company, and this award’s final nominee. “So I feel really grateful.”
Born in Papua New Guinea, Gray grew up in Sydney, then headed the theatre department of the British Academy of International Arts in Kuwait before founding Artistry Youth Dance, which focuses on young dancers of African and Caribbean descent. “I went to watch a show of a large dance school and I noticed that there were not very many black dancers,” she says. “I thought it was a chance for me to provide a safe space for young black dancers to get quality training. I hope my students feel that they can achieve anything, that there are no limitations for them.”
Dismissing the government’s recent implication that dance and the arts are not valuable, Gray insists that the benefits of studying dance – “resilience, teamwork, self-confidence” – are enormous, regardless of whether a pupil decides to go professional. “If this time period has taught us anything,” she says, “it is that there are no jobs that are secure. It is so important that people study dance, and have the resources to study it well, and the teachers to teach it well.”
Representation in arts education goes further than simply who is in the room. When it comes to anti-racism in the classroom, Gray says, “it’s in the resources we present, the shows we show our students, the artists we teach them about, the history. There are black dancers and black companies that are integral to the history of dance in this country so it really should be incorporated into everybody’s learnings, everybody’s curriculums.”
The BBTAs also give prizes to performers, directors, producers, technicians and activists. “Because theatres have been closed, and because of the Black Lives Matter movement, we were so determined to make sure that the BBTAs go ahead this year,” Okai says. “It’s a statement, and it’s a real spark of positivity.”
The awards will be streamed as-live in late October. “I hope they go on to open many more doors,” says Henry, “and bring down many more barriers.”
