Purity Spirals, Dance, Society
Reprint of article on Rosie Kay & reflection on society
I retired from the utterly toxic Scottish arts and dance world in January 2024. I (like many artists these days it seems) experienced being cancelled, silenced and generally kept out of ‘the community’ for not holding ‘the right’ views. I was always an outsider in a sense, working outwith the hierarchal structures of the industry and I held on for a good long time before I decided to take a break, despite 30 years of practice and immense popular success.
Being a working artist was not tenable anymore. For my wallet or my sanity. I reflect on this as Scotland prepares to enact draconian Hate Crime Laws, to legislate speech and prayer in the home via it’s Conversion Therapy Ban and to further embed programming based on critical theory into schools (this includes Critical Race and Queer Theory). What will society look like in twenty years time? I am reminded of Sparta, a culture which framed itself entirely around military means. It is not outwith the realm of possibility that society is shaping itself now, and soon we all will be relegated to our position in the new caste hierarchy.
As I reflect on this I find myself revisiting an earlier piece I penned for The Scottish Union for Education about Rosie Kay who is mindfully and bravely setting a new course. Someone said once, there are no heroes, the answer is you. So as you read this, think on what brave steps you are taking to not only preserve what is good but to stand up for what is right moving forward.
If you are in Glasgow on Saturday the 9th March do come to SUE’s Education Conference “Education Not Indoctrination”. We will be gathering to have important conversations around what is happening to our children in schools.
In the meantime here is a reprint from Scottish Union for Education Newsletter Number 21
“Rosie Kay; Purity Spirals and Dance”
The story of Rosie Kay is an important one for our time.
An eminent British choreographer, producer and dancer Rosie Kay was highly regarded artistically and academically until one day she found she held the wrong thoughts. And for this she lost everything.
In Vaclav Havel’s book The Power of The Powerless the former President and Political prisoner of the Czech Soviet Regime Vaclav Havel makes a case for the danger of ‘normalization’ a state in which action becomes impossible as people are rendered ‘unlikeable’. Normal is, in this context, a state sanctioned abnormality and no where is this more evident in the current state of the arts.
We can draw many parallels between totalitarian states of our past and the current politics and indeed “purity spirals” (and funding strands) of arts and artists today where one must stay within the perceived frame of ‘normal’ as set by a small vocal and powerful minority or face devastating consequences.
Rosie Kay did everything right. A rising star at London Contemporary Dance School she went on to become a choreographer of distinction, visionary and aspirational with a host of high end dance productions few dance artists will ever achieve.
The scale of her ambition ranged from her show 5 Soldiers (spanning the years 2010-2017), a portrait of army life where, in preparation, she joined the UK 4th Battalion, The Rifles, to watch and participate in full battle exercises, and visited the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre for our Armed Forces—- to her role as choreographer for the handover for the 2018 Commonwealth games televised to over one billion people and involving Birmingham Royal Ballet’s principal dancer Celine Gittens alongside over 500 volunteer dancers during the live televised show.
For 20 years her work received vast critical praise from legacy media, with five star reviews and accolades, as well as drawing in a wider ‘non-arts’ audience. Her commissions are forensic both in form, from a choreographic perspective, and content drawing from a vast body of research and knowledge. In 2013 she was the Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the University of Oxford.
In short, she was what dancers and choreographers aspire to be. She was doing it, making good work and thriving.
But in today’s state of dance, and the arts in general, that is not enough. It will never be enough.
Rosie made the mistake of revealing in a private conversation that she believed biological sex to be a real and immutable fact and for this she was subject to a witch hunt by the very dancers she employed. For this she lost the dance company she had founded and whose work brought it’s very success.
Reading this you might think this impossible and outrageous. You might believe this to be an outlier an otherwise stable and open minded industry and for this you would be wrong. The arts is broken, independent thought is no longer permitted in particular when it comes to the subject of biological sex or indeed any host of social justice parameters.
I have worked professionally in the arts sector for 30 years. When I came to Scotland in 2000 to pursue my Masters in Drama from the Royal Conservatoire I found Scotland and more specifically Glasgow to be a thrilling place with a ‘f*** it’ attitude where s*** happened. It was exciting and (more importantly) in it’s mad pursuit of personal and collective creativity, it was fun.
Somewhere along the way the arts decided it needed to atone for it’s own and the world’s perceived sins and everything funded started to have a moral slant. Whilst I can appreciate the noble aspirations of some of the purveyors of this goal, what it has done is create a framework and foot soldiers for absolutist art. We are fast becoming an arm of Mao’s Scotland.
Last year I attended Scottish Ballet’s (exceptionally well funded) 3 day conference on ‘Children Dance and Mental Health’. Having only just come out of lockdowns I was glad to see SB rise to the challenge of addressing the absolute devastation plagued upon our children over three years which was being widely reported on for it’s consequences on children’s mental and physical health. What I did not expect was to see a host of social justice sessions and not one mention of lockdown or poverty. I did not expect to hear about Scottish Ballet’s flagship outreach program ‘Safe to be Me’ that had toured to 60 primary and secondary schools in one year which propagandised gender theory. What was distinctly lacking from the program and indeed school programming was a focus on…dance.
This is de rigour in the dance sector. Scroll through funding opportunities on the Creative Scotland website and you will not find a funding strand that is free of social justice markers. Here is one from this month.
“We are also committed to working with and supporting artists from under-represented groups. We now have a two-stage application process: an initial selection is made then this is narrowed down in a second stage selection process. If you are a person from an under represented group or have a disability and/or is neurodiverse you can self-select to be put forward automatically to the second round, if you choose to do so. We also want to highlight that if you are an artist who has work that focuses on environmental awareness, that you can also choose to put yourself automatically through to the second stage of the selection process.”
This week long dance residency pays £750 for a week of work. This is no small fee. A 2015 survey found that more than half of professional dancers earn less than £5000 per year. And whilst the survey is old I can assure you there has not been any massive boon in the cultural world that has shifted that fee in any significant way. Dancers need paid work. What’s one to do when the baseline for normal is not dance but relationship to social justice?
How does this play out in the larger world if artists and organisations are to thrive? They must adapt and adopt the social justice mantle.
Imaginate is one such organisation. As the national organisation in Scotland, which purports to promote, develop and celebrate theatre and dance for children and young people it has recently made some strong financial and strategic partnerships with the UN and the UN development goals. What that means is the only two programs in their recent festival from Scotland were themed around climate change and child activism . As noted in my earlier piece on ‘Disaster Education’ this style of work is seeded by the research of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. It believes all life is based upon a system of power structures and therefore all teaching must first identify and dismantle those power structures in order to function. It does not in any way address what is developmentally appropriate as championed by Jean Piaget the eminent child psychologist the former go-to in programs for children. In fact it goes against child development.
Therefore the produced theatre seen here in Imaginate, in our National Theatre of Scotland and beyond, funded by Scottish Government and beyond, is pure propaganda. It does not take any child development into account, rather makes children vessels for the message. It will (and is) adding to the devastation we are forcing into children’s lives. There is no question or journey in these stories presented to kids, but rather a map of what to think and how to behave.
How does any artist survive in such a climate? Rosie Kay was devastated but she had a body of work to call on, the water shed of JK Rowling’s witch hunt had passed, she regrouped and reformed a new company, which was no mean feat. Without this visibility to continue in this field one must adopt the normal doctrine, or lose work, career, reputation and…. income.
There are no performing artists that I am aware of that have stood above the parapet in this fight (shout out to Magi Gibson, Jenny Lindsay and Elaine Miller who have fiercely and nobly fought in the writing and comedy circuit.
I can only assume the artists who hold up these social justice mantles are adopting these policies readily believing themselves to be doing a good thing. I can only assume the dancers who hounded Rosie Kay believed themselves to be doing a good thing. In arts sector meetings where I am compelled to use pronouns I am looked at with disbelief and reminded about ‘kindness’. Where does it end? Mao’s Red Guard also believed themselves to be holding up ‘the best cultural ideals’ when using compelled language as we use pronouns. But then as everyone was trained to look for an offence in everything (“the hammer sees everything as a nail”) everyone was a potential victim.
No one survives a purity spiral.
And where is dance in all this? Are we supposed to be likeable? Is our art supposed to propagate a frame and not a question? I don’t know. What I do know is that the current funded arts sector is a very powerful tool in state sanctioned propaganda which most don’t realise and our children are collateral damage in this fight.
As Vaclav Havel pointed out we are living in abnormal times. Can we find a way to just dance for the sake of it again?
Thank you for reading. Please consider supporting my work. You can ‘buy me a coffee’ here. Or become a paid subscriber for as little as £3.50 per month, £25 for the year, or £250 for a founding membership. Every penny makes a difference and allows me to keep speaking out about the failure in safeguarding for our children in schools and cultural institutions. We need to recognise, preserve and celebrate childhood. No one else is doing this in the arts in Scotland. And know that I will not be silenced. We must all live in truth. Thank you.