Audio before Critical Mass
Billy Trevitt: We may have to wait until we’ve actually gotten to the stage and heard it.
Michael Nunn: Yeah.
Billy Trevitt: to get that right. But maybe just a more genuine chat is better. You ready for us?
Unknown voice: We are yeah, yeah.
Billy Trevitt: Okay. We’ll be down in a second. Cheers.
Unknown voice 2: Do the whole thing. Introduce the show to me, and go through the queues. Give me the whole schpiel.
Michael Nunn: Okay.
Billy Trevitt: Into the first film?
Unknown voice 2: No. Yes, into… Yeah, into the film.
Michael Nunn: Okay, so first of all, house lights to half. Then I’m gonna say, uh, my name’s Michael Num, and you say,
Billy Trevitt: I’m Billy Trevitt,
Michael Nunn: and we’re Artistic Directors of BalletBoyz, and this show is Still Pointless at 25. The you do the phone thing.
Billy Trevitt: Yeah, I’m gonna say, like it’s a real announcement: Please turn off your phones. Switch off all your devices, put them away. Don’t disturb the rest of the audience.
Michael Nunn: And we’d like to start by taking a little trip down memory lane back to 2001 when we started this company, BalletBoyz, from scratch. Are you going to say anything else?
Billy Tevitt: uh, no. How do we… We just press play?
Michael Nunn: Play.

Video before Critical Mass
Tell us what’s going on?
We’ve got a video here from a performance given by the Russell Maliphant Company. We’re going to try and learn the piece from this tape, we’ll watch it, re-create it, and hopefully perform it eventually.
Right, so here we go, let’s see if I can get a clear picture.
Where am I? Where’s the front? Who am I?
Are our legs facing the same direction as each other? You’re behind me on this side? No, to my right side, you’re there, like that. Yeah?
No! Yes, yes, yes, yes, you’re right. Go back to the beginning
It’s a busy week, there’s lots of meetings, and stuff to organise. We’re in some sort of ice-cold church hall, and it’s absolutely freezing in here, it’s snowing outside
Three, four, five, as you go down, and then we’re going to go, something like that, that’s where we are now.
We haven’t even done 10 seconds
Can you demonstrate that?
Okay, we’re at the Roundhouse and it’s Monday, a week before our show. They haven’t sold any tickets. They’ve sold seven tickets. They’re supposed to sell all the tickets
Are you with me? Let’s go.
Look, look what we’ve been spending our money on recently, Mum.
You probably can’t hear much at the moment because the crane’s going, but this is our front house decoration. They’re gonna be hung off the roof of the round house here.
You could do me a slow panning shot actually if I just sit like this
This is the best seat in the house. Here. This is the height as well, apparently.
What’s the dressing room? Show me the dressing rooms.
What is that I can hear dripping? Uh that’s the sewer.
Is it just the sewer?
And we’ve got to put the girls in here.
Yeah.
Look, there’s us in the papers, did you see that? Got it in the light? It was in the Standard the other day.
It’s going to look awesome, isn’t it? It’s going to look awesome. Yeah
It’s a big stage Billy. Shame now one’s coming to see it, but it’s a big stage.
What’s going on? We’ve been kicked out. It’s 11 o’clock at night. We’ve finished the stage. Look at it. Spectacular. Look, there’s our logo going up over there. We’re painting those. The seats are here, we’re doing some sound tomorrow. The lights are all in, the dressing rooms are in the dressing rooms, rooms. The film’s coming together the…

Getting very close now to the show. I’m a little bit nervous about the queuing, about the dancers, about myself, about everything really, I suppose.
I’ve got a lot to do in the next couple of days. I think it’s possible, but it means working very long hours again. I’d like to have some food this week at some point. And… I don’t know, it’s very difficult to see it now because we’ve been so close to it. We’ve seen the pieces so many times, I can’t really distance myself to judge whether it’s any good or not.
We need to get someone independent.
Yeah, but whatever other people say will think the opposite anyway, so what do we do? Let’s get back to work Billy.
You coming?

Audio before Motor Cortex
I think one of the best things about being an artistic director of a dance company is finding new talent, commissioning new talent, and watch them emerge. Usually, we’re looking elsewhere, outside the company, but this time, we found one of the dancers within the company that we’ve worked with for a few years now, Seirian Griffiths, and we’ve been very excited about his talent as a choreographer, and we wanted to see what would happen if we gave him ten dancers and a great big stage to work on. Yeah, so this is Motor Cortex.

Audio before Ripple
We are always on the look-out for choreographers and sometimes they come from the most unexpected places. We were on tour in China, performing in Shanghai, and we got the name of a choreographer who, someone recommended we should see, Xie Xin. Yeah, and all the dancers went to her studio, did a few hours of dancing with her, and it was immediately apparent that there was a great thing going on there between the dancers and Xie Xin. So we immediately commissioned her, didn’t we? Yeah. And she was inspirational. She’s a beautiful mover, and totally beguiling to watch. And she ended up making this totally beguiling piece called Ripple.

Audio before Fallen
Take me into Fallen. Russell Maliphant is the choreographer for we wanted to work with, first of all, when we started our company. You saw this in an earlier film. We went into that studio with the videotape, learned the work, and he basically said no. But we were assistant, and eventually persuaded him, and that’s led to a long and fruitful relationship. Yeah, he’s made several works for us. Torsion, Broken Fall, and, I suppose, when we retired from the stage, we replaced ourselves with younger, fitter, more beautiful versions of ourselves, we wanted them to have that same experience. working with Russell. And that’s where Fallen came from.

Film before Young Men
Action
Interview me then
I wonder if it’s going to get louder and louder if I get closer to that
Yup, you’re in frame. That crinkling is too much.
I think that our job is
it is. …to capture how life really is for us. And then at a later stage when we’re looking at all the material, find how that’s going to be interesting for an audience.
Yeah. That’s exactly what I think.
That’s luckily isn’t it
This is the first day on our camera, this is the first day on our camera. It’s the… what is it? 15th of May. We bought all this yesterday. We’ve read a couple of pages from the instruction manual, and what day is it today, Thursday? And on Saturday we’ve got to go and do it properly.
We’ve been interested in film making for as long as I can remember really. We joined the Royal Ballet company together and almost immediately bought ourselves a camera and then a video camera
With our own company BalletBoyz we’re constantly looking for opportunities to get dance on the screen.
Well I suppose this is the story of how Young Men from its beginnings as a kind of experiment in the studio, which then developed into a full length stage work, and now I suppose it’s become a sort of meditation on men at war, told without words.
And that’s what I like about dance and movement, the way it has this ability to tell a very complex emotional narrative without the use of any words.
So what I’m interested in bringing Young Men to film is the collaboration with Michael and Billy, their vision, what do they see from the choreography, what do they focus on. I think the camera can give us a sort of bigger look and right away we can be in the detail.
Making a dance film is one thing. Making a dance film on location about war is another. So we didn’t really know it would work. I mean you can hypothesize in the studio about what it might be like to dance in the trench or in a battlefield or on a playground. But until you’re actually there on location you don’t know.
We’ve been filming dance for a very long time but I don’t think until this point we’ve really considered it to be an expression, an artistic expression quite as much. This film was really an opportunity to put everything we’d always thought about and wondered about into practice and create our own piece of art.
It’s still an attempt. The only thing we can do is to attempt to touch this subject. It’s definitely bigger than us, and I think it’s also bigger than the spectator, but at the same time we’re all given some time in our lives to look at it instead of ignore it. And I think that already gives it the value.

Film before Bradley 4:18
Liam Scarlett
That was beautiful, guys. Yeah, good. I think keep the leg down so that this one, that one’s kind of high, and then as you go down, that one can lower that way to come back up, yeah?
I wanted a sense of fluidity and a constant moving quality to it. This is why we wanted to go for that snake-like thing to have a real animalistic quality. Again, to have something so supple and beautiful with a more of a deadly attack underneath. Really focusing on the subtlety of stuff as opposed to the sheer physicality of it. It took a while, but once you find that language and build up on it, it gets quite exhilarating.
I think.
Michael Nunn & Billy Trevitt
Often in our shows, we have interstitial films between works. And the purpose originally was to cover up a quick change.

And also, because we work with so many different choreographers and composers, we thought it might be interesting for audiences to see how these works were created and constructed. Demystifying, I think it used to be called.
Russell Maliphant
(eight, nine, ten.)
Half the work is finding the palette for movement we’re doing. You know We’re searching for a vocabulary then composing.
I don’t want to see you go over, just balance and back up.
William Forsythe
I assume that every dancer I work with is at some point that could be the best dancer in the world. If they only receive the right information so your job is to make everyone the best dancer they could conceivably be. Basta.
But I assume, and this is something I learned from Richard Serra, the sculptor, he said: “I always assume my viewers are much more intelligent than I.” Yeah, and I think that if you keep that in mind, that’s a really good thing to do
Michael Clark
You didn’t want to be filmed.
Well to be honest, the truth about this is that I said with five days to do the piece I’d rather not do anything with the film until I’ve done the piece. So we still haven’t quite done the film aspect of it. Is that right? Yeah, of course. I just found it really just too intrusive in the end.
I’d rather not have that kind of… I don’t want to think about how I look when I’m working on something.
Akram Khan
Kathak is something that is very organic which is very relaxed, it’s more human. Whereas classical dance is more about perfection. So, classical dance has very specific geometrical lines and structural lines in the body.
Freddie Opoku Addaie
What are we thinking?
It’s hard. It’s really hard, actually.
What is it that you’re looking for?

I mean, it’s pretty simple. Someone who’s willing to sacrifice themselves in that space, and I haven’t seen that thing yet. And I think there needs to be something boiling in here. That’s why I said something again. There needs to be something boiling. It should be like a ritual, something that you’re really honing yourself in for. You could just do that for the whole minute and go, that’s it. Because you’re that confident that you can do that, and people watch you.
Paul Roberts
The thing that’s hard for me is the score. Getting to grips with that. It’s tricky? Yeah because obviously we’re just 8s and 4s and 6s, but this is just all over the place. 13s, 12s, 17, yeah, 111s. Yeah, I’m confident, there’s just a lot to do isn’t there.
All right, we’ll see you a bit later, crack on.
Might come an d ask for a bit of help later…
We’ll be here
Xie Xin
I mean, Ripple is something you have pushing, and then pushing, and then connecting. It’s like somebody or something or the memory is just not really calm, like a water, like an ocean. My heart is like, “Pffft.”
Javier de Frutos
There is enough drama in the music for encounters to happen that are not necessarily relevant or explainable. It’s just the music seems to bring some kind of tension in a good way.
If you really use it, like if it’s a film, it almost makes sense. It’s almost like I’m treating it… I don’t know dramaturgically what is going on, except that for some reason it’s making them react dramatically.
Christopher Wheeldon
Bradley, let’s just have you just reach across, and Jordan, can you just pull this arm back and just touch fingertip to fingertip. And when you touch fingertip to fingertip, it’s going to be hard, I think, across the body. Is there any way for that connection just to kind of send a ripple out through your bodies?
Try again.
And then just come back to where you were. Oh, I’m going to enjoy this. I’m going to like this. It’s going to be good. One more time please

Maxine Doyle
It was one of the first, when you asked me would I be interested in making a work for the company one of my questions I was asking myself were: Ok, what do we have in common? You know, as a mature woman and mother, coming in to a group of young men, what’s our, conversation? Not so much a piece about how men behave together but more about humanity and the different kinds of men I was in the room with.
Can we try… a version where you’re going backwards?

Audio before Us
How long have you known Chris? I think we’ve known Christopher Wheeldon since he was 11 years old. He was at the Royal Ballet School at the same time we were. We joined the Royal Ballet Company, and he followed us there. But he left and went to New York, and developed this incredible skill as a choreographer, a world renowned choreographer. Yeah, and it was tricky, actually, because when we wanted to work with him, and we commissioned him, he really wanted to work with us, but he just didn’t have time. So we decided to just fly to New York. We rented a studio, and we just basically hung out. And he used to come to us, didn’t he, in his lunch hours, worked for an hour and a half, and then get in a taxi, go back to the theatre. So we’ve always been very grateful for that. And sort of the same thing happened for Us. Yeah, this duet you’re about to see is called Us, and the same thing happened. We had a couple of dancers with us from London, and we hung out and waited till Chris had a break in his rehearsals elsewhere, and he came, and initially knew nothing about what he wanted to make. He had the music by Keaton Henson, and no real firm idea. He had a bit of a narrative, he says, going on in his head, but he’s never explained that to either of us. We don’t know what it is. So make of that what you will, in this beautiful duet, Us.

Voiceover in Fiction
“Aham, aham, aham, aham.”
“Tell me when you’re ready.”
“Yep, ready?” “Okay.”
The choreographer and dancer Javier de Frutos, who was killed last night in the interval of his latest…
The choreographer and dancer Javier de Frutos, who was killed last night in the interval of his latest premiere, aged 52, was renowned for providing scandal and provocation in British contemporary dance. His death, when a plastic glass shard used as scenery accidentally fell from its moorings, drew public calls to abandon the work created for the BalletBoyz. But the reaction was…
His death, when a plastic glass shard used as scenery accidentally fell from its moorings… Aha.
His death, when a plastic glass shard used as scenery accidentally fell from its moorings, drew public calls to abandon the work created for the BalletBoyz. But the reaction was that de Frutos was the last choreographer who would want his death to spoil his show.
De Frutos courted… De Frutos courted controversy from the start of his career, flamboyantly exploring his conflicts as a passionate Catholic homosexual, in intense, often violently explicit dance works, and was fearless in denouncing bureaucracy when he felt it strangled his creativity.
Blood, death, nudity, sex, and theatrical excess were his calling cards. For one notorious Sadler’s Wells creation, showing a grotesquely abusive pope, he received death threats, and the BBC refused to broadcast it as planned.
He claimed that an Arts Council report on his first commission stated that it was “the biggest piece of crap” they had seen for years. But de Frutos had a surprisingly enduring career,
beginning with nude solo performances on experimental stages,
and ending in the bosom of the establishment of…
But de Frutos had a surprisingly enduring career, beginning with nude solo performances on experimental stages, and ending in the bosom of establishing…
Hmmm.
But de Frutos had a surprisingly enduring career, beginning with nude solo performances on experimental stages, and ending in the bosom of establishment acclaim for his choreography in National Theatre and West End productions.
Although he dubbed himself “the Queen of Offending,” de Frutos’ aim was serious. He said, “People come out of curiosity to see a naked man, and my task is to convince them that this work couldn’t have been performed by anything other than a naked man. I am very aware… I am very aware that I am provoking.”
Javier Esteban de Frutos Fernandez was born on May 15, 1963, in Caracas, the elder son of a Spanish typewriter mechanic who went into exile in Venezuela in opposition to General Franco.
While attending an all-boys Catholic school, he took himself to his first dance lesson, aged 16.

While attending an all-boys Catholic school, he took himself to his first dance lesson, aged 16.
Told he was too old, he started an architecture to first his father, and then he dropped in favour of dance. Soon, he dropped in favour of dance. He performed with a minimum…
He told him he was too old to perform.
He started an architecture to first his father, and then he dropped in favour of dance training, first in London…
“Last Dance” by Donna Summer plays