PHANTOM
Despite always working from an intensely personal place, Holly Blakey has never considered any of her work to be wholly autobiographical, until she worked on Phantom. Originally commissioned by the London Contemporary Dance School for the EDGE Postgraduate Dance Company, Phantom is described by Blakey as “a ritualistic summoning of something that never arrives”, a spiritual interrogation of the symbolism and aesthetics of pagan fertility rites and a wry ode to folk dance traditions. Though she draws heavily from the esoteric and supernatural, the narrative of the piece is very much lifted from Blakey’s own life, rising up out of a very real place. “Phantom was made because I was commissioned to go and make this new work for EDGE and I had just had a miscarriage,” explains Blakey. “I felt completely exhausted and pretty helpless and I hadn’t any ideas and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t have much strength.”
At the end of the dance the phantom hangs in the air, yet nothing has arrived. We are left, panting and sweating, among the dancers, the wracking paroxysms of labour channeled into a dance of intense intimacy and defiant strength that subsides in anticlimax. “The whole dance is really this big, long building of slow anticipation that just stops,” explains Blakey. “I think without realizing it, and then probably somewhere realizing it at the same time, I was creating an experience that I’d had, really unraveling it in it’s mundane nothingness.”
