The healing power of choreographer Botis Seva’s BLKDOG
Choreographer Botis Seva revels in the culture of community, as shown by BLKDOG, the show he is bringing to Melbourne’s Rising Festival.
Growing up surrounded by the then largely white population of the East London town of Dagenham could be challenging for a young black teenage boy, and Botis Seva is the first to admit he wasn’t the most committed pupil. Regularly on the receiving end of racist taunts, there were plenty of reasons for him to skip school.
Luckily for him – and global audiences today – there was one compelling reason he kept coming back: dance.
In the early 2000s Seva’s local school was one of a handful experimenting with ways to encourage students to continue attending, in this case through free after-school dance and music workshops with professional choreographers and DJs. The catch, of course, was you had to be at school in the first place.
“I wasn’t the greatest student at school, sometimes I would have naughty days when I was like, ‘I don’t want to be at school’, but because our training sessions were always after school I knew if I didn’t get in trouble I could go straight to dance,” Seva says.
“It was the music that attracted me, my first session I was listening in the corner, going, ‘what is this?’. But I decided to just give it a go. Ever since then I loved it.”
Seva took to dance like it was the most natural thing in the world and within a decade of starting hip-hop dance theatre company Far From the Norm, this largely untrained dancer-choreographer would receive the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production for his 2018 work, BLKDOG. Commissioned by London’s Sadler’s Wells, the work has toured the UK and North America, and is now touring to Australia at Melbourne’s Rising Festival in June.
“To this day we’re still touring, making work, it sometimes feels like a dream,” says Seva, shaking his head in disbelief. “You start it because you’re passionate and you love it but when it gets this reach, to think we’re coming to Melbourne, it feels like a weird, very surreal experience. But it’s amazin’.”
The 33-year-old is speaking to The Australian from London, where he is based. A humble, gentle and thoughtful conversationalist, his demeanour belies the raw, often confronting, brooding works he tends to create.
“Within the work I make I’m always talking about the people we are – I grew up around black, white, Asians – and that community, when we’re dancing, I just love people being together. That for me is one of the important things. I like to understand who I am as a human, basically. The colour of my skin does matter to some people but for some people it doesn’t. We dance to be seen as human.”
One of five children raised by a single mother, Seva has diverse heritage: the Democratic Republic of Congo on his father’s side while his mother is Angolan. Music and dance were always part of his upbringing and although he recalls his mum always dancing at parties, Seva himself never took dance classes.
Citing Michael Jackson as his main dance inspiration, Seva says his biggest influence as a child was the music his parents each brought into his childhood.
While Dagenham is now culturally rich, the town he grew up in was not.
“When we were first there it was hard to adjust because people were constantly looking at me like, ‘who are these people?’. There was a lot of racism. The first time I heard the ‘n’ word was towards my little sister when she was only eight, she said to me that someone down the road in a house had called her that word. I never knew it before.”
When he discovered the freedom of dance – freedom from identity, skin colour, class – and the outlet it gave him to express himself and his ideas, he was hooked. Soon he found local youth clubs and centres where other kids would meet and dance or play music, a space that was free to use and where he began experimenting with choreography. He quickly connected with like-minded kids who introduced him to a range of dance styles, and together they began creating small works and entering dance competitions.
Before he knew it, aged just 19, he’d formed a company, Far From the Norm, in 2009.
“The company started from a youth centre and just escalated somehow,” he says. “I wanted to do hip-hop and street dance but we were always called the weirdos because we’d experiment in the language of hip-hop. I never wanted to be conventional, I always wanted to find a different outlet for how I saw the world, so the name came because I was exploring different ways of expressing what I see in the world.”
Today it is still rooted in hip-hop dance theatre but each dancer brings their own individual skills, from krumping and popping to house and contemporary dance. Although yet to find a permanent home, Far From the Norm has fast earned a name for being a cutting-edge, must-see company, the 13 dancers sharing stories grounded in real life.
As artistic director-choreographer, Seva’s choreographic style is inspired by film, art, architecture and theatre. He works collaboratively in a process he describes as “give and take”, sharing ideas and movement. His works have been performed in theatres and outdoor festivals from Toronto to Luxembourg, San Francisco and New York, and he has worked on numerous film commissions.
Seva’s first theatre commission as guest choreographer came in 2017, with the Scottish Dance Theatre, and he has since collaborated with British choreographer Wayne McGregor on a BBC2 film, Winged Bull in the Elephant Case. Earlier this year he worked with Nederlands Dans Theatre’s NDT 2 on Falling into Shadow, now touring the Netherlands.
“It was definitely a challenging process but a rewarding one,” he says of working with NDT 2. “The dancers were so hungry to try new stuff, and for me it was refreshing to see it on new bodies, (although needing to) adapt quite quickly was quite hard.”
In 2018 Sadler’s Wells invited him to create a new work as part of its 20th anniversary program, Reckonings, and BLKDOG was born.
The idea behind this work came to him when his attention was caught by a title in the National Theatre bookshop, Shoot the Damn Dog. The 2008 book by the late Sally Brampton, journalist and founder of Elle, was an insightful exploration of depression through the author’s personal experiences. Seva bought the book and was captivated.
Not long after, he and his partner had their first child, a son, and Seva found himself struggling with fatherhood, responsibility and fear, a struggle that lasted a couple of years. “I was never in a depression but I felt low moods, quite a lot,” he explains.
As always, he found he was best able to express himself through movement, and he began to create BLKDOG, incorporating his own experiences and what it meant to be lost in a dark place, but also the experiences of his dancers, many of whom had been through challenging situations; and even those of the families he observed growing up.
“The show is based on adulthood but also childhood, dealing with the childhood some people never had,” he says. “For many adults who look back on their childhood some of it could have been traumatic and some of it we’re still trying to heal. I made it because I know there are people out there who don’t speak about these things, and I wanted it to be something you can really connect to.”
The touring production features eight dancers and is a brooding, dark work set to a pulsating soundscape from Seva’s regular musical collaborator, Torben Lars; the anonymous hooded sweatshirts and darkly cartoon-like spiky costumes by Ryan Dawson Laight.
Seva – who now also has twins, aged three – says he has been gratified by the personal stories audience members have shared with him after seeing the work in America and Canada.
“A lot of older men and also women have spoken about their past and how the show really helped them or how they’ve really connected with it because it’s stuff they’ve been through,” he says. “The show might not be for everyone but for most people who watch it they’re really affected by the idea of what it brings to them.”
When BLKDOG premiered in 2018 reviewer Graham Watts noted in Bachtrack: “Seva is a choreographer on the cusp of a new direction in the shifting sands of British contemporary dance and one likely to have a big following in its future.” In 2024 Sadler’s Wells appointed Seva associate artist, a milestone that, in his own words, is “an amazing achievement”.
During the Covid lockdowns BLKDOG was streamed live from London’s Sadler’s Wells as part of the 2021 Adelaide Festival, but this is the company’s first time in Australia.
“We’re just super glad to be bringing the actual show, live,” Seva says. “If you do take something out of it (hopefully it’s) to always check in on people. There’s just too much going on at the moment, in the media, on social media and I think we look to the world for answers, whereas as humans we have the answers.”
Seva’s own answer, of course, is to dance. “Dance is such a great outlet to really express what you’re feeling at a moment in time. It can also heal the mind and the body. When you’re in the moment it becomes beyond a spiritual connection, there’s no other way you can explain it.”
Part of the Rising festival, BLKDOG will be performed at Arts Centre Melbourne, June 4-7.
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