Holly Blakey is among the foremost choreographers of her generation and one of the few female choreographers in the UK creating large-scale work. Her practice attends to the honest entanglements of embodied vulnerability, grief, and joy, always rooted in an intersectional trans-feminist frame. As a director and choreographer, she has collaborated with artists including Rosalía, Harry Styles, and Florence + The Machine, and with fashion houses such as Vivienne Westwood, Burberry and Dior, interweaving live and commercial contexts, much of her practice often plays on the relationship between these distinct but not wholly separable worlds.
Blakey has been creating ensemble works since 2015, when she presented Some Greater Class with Hales Gallery and Southbank Centre. Lo, a new large scale work is a dark, embodied fairy tale exploring how failure, forgetting, and imagination can become sites of creative power. It represents a significant evolution in the scale and ambition of Blakey’s live performance work and is in development for 2026/27.
Blakey is a recipient of a UK MVA award for her work on Delilah (Florence and the Machine) for ‘Best Choreography in a Video’. That same year she was also nominated as ‘Best New Director’.
After the world premiere of ‘Cowpuncher’ (2018) - a commission to reopen Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall - Blakey presented ‘Cowpuncher My Ass’ (2020), a sequel to the previous, costumed by Vivienne Westwood and scored by Mica Levi. The show and its sequels ran for five years, closing to a sold out Royal Festival Hall with accompaniment from a twenty piece string orchestra from London Contemporary Orchestra.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. From its risible title onwards, it literally writhes with self-loathing and misanthropy. This is frenzy without rapture, sexuality without pleasure, speed without exhilaration. It shoots from the conservatoire to the strip club, the ballet to the rave to the mosh pit. I can’t wait for what Holly Blakey does next.” The Guardian
