Transcript Lou Cope talks to Kate Prince 30 June 2020

Lou: Hello, Kate Prince. Thank you very much for joining me. How are you doing?

Kate: I'm doing pretty good, I would say on a slightly gray and rainy afternoon, but it's all good.

Lou: It’s pretty miserable, isn't it? It's better when the sun's shining, do you find?

Kate: I actually really like both. My husband always is slightly confused by my love of rain and we've just been camping and it rained for two of the days and I love it when you're in a tent and there was a storm and it was windy outside and the rain is going… so I'm kind of happy in both.

Lou: Yeah, I get that. You've been camping literally just recently during lockdown?

Kate: Yeah, on the weekend.

Lou: Oh my God. How was it? Amazing.

Kate: Good. We've been a couple of times. I mean, it's slightly glamorous camping, we borrowed my parents' camping van and on both of these trips, we've actually been camping in their garden, so we’re able to see them, but not going inside the house or touching anything, I think, that they touch.

Lou: Okay. So I'll get rid of the image of you on the top of a mountain.

Kate: Well, we're about to do that in Devon, actually.

Lou: Yeah, okay. So, how are you, Kate? How are you doing, experiencing the whole…

Kate: I'm not sure if I've really even thought about that for several months. You know what, I'm remarkably good. I would say I'm very… I'm feel very, not stressed.

Lou: Ah, okay. So have you been uber busy during this time, or have you had some time to chill and reflect?

Kate: I've had phases… I think the first month we, both of us, we already… all we did was look after our daughter; play games, play boardgames, build Lego, magnet building, painting. We didn't do any schoolwork with her. We didn't do any work for us. We all just played and we had no rules, and it went on for about four or five weeks. It was lovely, very simple, we just walked the dog every day, and that’s, you know… Lou: And then?

Kate: And then we both decided we have to get back on the work thing. And we started splitting days of childcare and work, and then suddenly life started having structure, and a time that something had to be done. But I mean, I think we were ready for it by then. And now we've gone even a step further and Ella’s grandma's helping her out with childcare and we're both trying to do a full days of work again.

Lou: It's difficult, isn't it? Do you feel a constant sense of guilt like me?

Kate: No, do you know what I like doing? One of my guilty pleasures working at home is… I have my lunch and then a cup of tea, I take about an hour at lunch time and I'll watch probably an episode of something… slightly trashy, like Grey's Anatomy, in the middle of the day. It feels lovely.

Particularly like if Ella was at school or if she's, you know, she's round her grandma's today, and the house is quiet. Neil’s gone out to walk the dog and I've got a moment where I can watch my soap opera in the hospital. It's just… yeah, I like that.

Lou: Yeah. I totally get it. I've developed a very serious relationship with George Clark's ‘Amazing Spaces’, I don't know if you've ever seen that.

Kate: No, what’s that?

Lou: Oh, it’s about doing camper vans up, or little countryside huts. I think it's living vicariously, like you say, that kind of camping, rainy feel… watching people create spaces where that can happen… you know, while I'm stuck here is a very nice thing. Okay, so you're doing all right, that's good. What has COVID-19 stopped you from doing, what were you in ZooNation in the middle of when…

Kate: So… ‘Message in a Bottle’ was coming… had a week left of a run at the Peacock in London and was about to go to… Manchester, Birmingham, Zurich, Luxembourg, Lyon… it was about to do, still our first ever international tour dates and it all got pulled.

Everything went. It's harder for the dancers and the stage management crew than it was for me, because technically my contract had finished, and then I'd started another contract, which is a writing contract. So I'd have been working from home anyhow, but for the dancers and the company, you know, their livelihood gone, just gone.

Lou: Yeah. It's just crazy isn't it? And… it's not, I mean, of course the money is really important, but it's also just the joy. Well, the joy of sharing the work. All the expectations of sharing the work and the response to the work.

Kate: They did about six or seven weeks, I think… something like that. So they did, they got a good run of it.

Enough that I think that they, you know, that they felt that they'd done it. The work hadn't been in vain, but it's yeah, it was pretty harsh for them, I think. To think that they would have been employed till the end of June, I think, something like that. Lou: So for you, your role as artistic director, were you involved in there in the decisions to pull the plug?

Kate: No, because ‘Message in a Bottle’ is entirely produced by Sadler’s Wells and Universal Music. So sometimes ZooNation are full producers, sometimes we’re co-producers and sometimes we’re nothing. And with ‘Message in a Bottle’, we were nothing in terms of producing. So we, you know, I was employed by them and the name of the company was on it because that's… I try and make the work I do and the company that I built to be, you know, joined together.

Lou: And it was your idea.

Kate: Sorry?

Lou: It was your idea. The show.

Kate: Yeah, it was, yeah.

Lou: But that doesn’t change that you don't wish to have it within your repertoire?

Kate: You don't always get the choice. That was an email that I sent to the head of Sadler’s Wells, Alistair Spalding, and I was discussing with him, I think ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’ and some other shows that were ZooNation shows, and what the company had coming up and what our plans were.

And I wrote it at sort of Christmas time, and at the end of it, I said, ‘PS, I've been having this idea’. And I just told him, I pitched him sort of two lines about an idea about the Police and Sting. So it was my idea and it's all been my original idea to do it… we weren't in a position to produce something like that.

And Sadler's Wells and Universal Music went and got the rights for it and they've co- produced it together.

Lou: Interesting, okay. I'm so naive about these things, I just assumed that was as a ZooNation product and that you owned it.

Kate: Yeah, no, it's too large scale and commercial for us, we don't have that sort of money.

Lou: Okay. Interesting. okay. So that's what you were doing, what have you been doing, what has the company been doing? I've seen that you've got a digital offer called, ‘Dance on Demand’, can you tell us about that?

Kate: You know, so we tried to generate some, albeit very small, but some work to still engage some of our artists, dance artists in some work, so we've been doing ‘Dance on Demand’, a series of different classes.

They've done everything with… Lizzie Gough's done a yoga and body maintenance and Idney’s done house and Hakim has done breaking and Dannielle’s done whacking and Bradley's done locking. I think there's talk of me doing one which I'm slightly trying to get out of. I might be doing one. And I think Tommy's about to do a REP one where he's teaching some REP from the Mad Hatter's tea party. So we've just been trying to… from one side support those artists and give them a bit of cash and some focus, but also provide some stimulus for dancers who want to keep training from home.

Lou: So it's for dancers really.

Kate: It's for dancers, but it's for anyone. I know some of the office team have been doing it at home with their kids. They're not dancers. Yeah. So it's kind of been for anyone.

Lou: Do you have an idea of take-up? Whether people that you don't know are doing it? it's interesting that everybody's pouring out all this work.

Kate: Frankie, our marketing manager would know about that, I guess, doing analytics, but no, I'm not sure.

Lou: Okay, I've got so much I want to talk to you about, you know, there's a lot happening in the world right now, particularly in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement gathering energy, and also as you're well aware, lots of conversations about wanting to systemically change how the art sector organizes itself.

But before we talk about all of that, I really just want to talk about your work. So yeah, you mentioned ‘Message in a Bottle’, I think it opened in February, it's got very good reviews. Well done. That's very exciting for you.

Kate: It’s nice you say that, it's probably got as many bad reviews.

Lou: Oh, well I’ve been looking and found the good ones. I didn’t go searching for bad reviews.

Kate: We've always had that. I think even when ‘Into the Hoods’ was in the West End, it got I think mostly four and five star reviews, but it had a one star review of it in a major paper that absolutely hated it. So, you know…

Lou: Oh well, ho-hum. That doesn't go the poster. So… and also of course you make work outside of ZooNation, you choreographed ‘Everybody's Talking about Jamie’, a West End show and you’ve worked on ‘Strictly’, ‘So You Think You Can Dance’… so my question is, what motivates you to do what you do? What is the… where does the desire come from across all of those different sorts of areas?

Kate: I think I've got… I've changed as I've gotten older… I'm eating a polo, can you hear it a little bit? Made a really badly timed choice of sweets.

Lou: I hadn't noticed, but now you mention it!

Kate: So I think when I was younger… I was trying to think about this, cause I've been looking at my daughter who's five and thinking ‘by your age, I already knew that it was dance. I knew it’. I knew very young and I was in, and by the time I was eight or nine, I was choreographing and bossing my friends around organizing them, ‘You stand here, you stand here’, costumes, sets at school that we would do, all of it.

And at the time… so back then it was about the steps. It was about learning a move, copying a move, making up a move, all about steps. And I think that was my interest for a really long time, was the steps and the spacing and the transitions and the formations.

But someone asked me the other day, what drives me to make work, and it's story. Before anything else for me now, and has been, I would say for 10 years now, since we did ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’, it's story… and we did ‘Into the Hoods’, and it was a story with an excuse for good steps, like - good story, fun story, but it was about the steps and about the look.

But when we did ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’, the emphasis completely swapped for me and it suddenly became about story. And now the only thing that motivates me is story, I would say.

Lou: Interesting. And so you talk about writing, so now you’re… have you always written?

Kate: I mean, I'm not a writer, but then I'm not really a choreographer either.

I've got no qualifications in either, I'm not trained in either. But, no, I've always written poetry and short stories and that kind of, you know, I've always written stuff. And then I started writing scripts that were dance scripts. So very descriptive story, layout structure, character development, none of which is spoken, and then gradually ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’, sort of started writing lyrics and scripts.

And then from there have moved on… ‘Mad Hatter’ was the same sort of thing. And then ‘SYLVIA’ at the old Vic was basically a book musical. So I've just kind of, you know… I don't know if I'm any good at it, but I really like doing it!

Lou: Well it seems to be going okay! And how come hip hop is your language then, your dance language? How did that happen?

Kate: I think I’ve been given the label of hip hop, I think dance is dance for starters. I'm as influenced by Gene Kelly as I am by Tina Landon, who was Janet Jackson's choreographer. And I think the two of them are my biggest influences. I… trained in what was called ‘street jazz’ or ‘street funk’, in the early nineties, for about a year in London.

And I was introduced to this idea of what street dance actually was. And I'd loved, I think, as a kid, I'd loved the movie specifically, ‘Street Dance 2: Electric Boogaloo’, and I'd started seeing and understanding what popping was, and the skill of it and what locking was and what breaking was… and then obviously through MTV, I was very aware of, the sort of commercialized side of street, where artists like Janet Jackson had taken street influences and commercialised them into pop videos.

And then I think after I graduated university and I moved to London from Scotland, I trained then with Jimmy Williams. I used to attend his class at Pineapple all the time, and he specifically taught foundations in popping and locking. And I did that for years and I feel like through doing that… and then I took class in Paris, specifically in house dance. And then in New York, on three different trips and in LA on three different trips, and learnt… through all those classes and through training in London, I started learning foundation skills in all these different dance elements that come from hip hop culture. Cause technically there's no such thing as hip hop dance, there’s hip hop culture, and there are four elements of hip hop culture, and breaking is the only element of hip hop culture that is a dance element.

Popping and locking, are actually called funk styles, and they come under a different umbrella. So I think that hip hop culture includes rap and a lot of our work includes MC’ing and rap. So I totally understand why we have the label of hip hop… ‘Into the Hoods’… I can see that, a show called ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’, I can see that.

And that's sort of consolidated this impression of me being some kind of hip hop expert, but I’m not; I'm a hip hop novice and I'm learning and I learn every day and I'm a guest in a house that is not mine.

Lou: Okay, nicely put. So do you see… is there a link between that dance language and the stories you want to tell?

Kate: Well, I think… so, when I said like, my influences would be Gene Kelly and Tina Landon, the Gene Kelly side of it for me is musical theater; like old school ‘Singing in the Rain’, ‘Westside Story’ all the musicals I grew up watching. And when I wanted to make shows on stage, I wanted them to have the kind of stories and structure of these old-fashioned musicals that I liked.

But I wanted them to look and sound more like the MTV world that I also loved in the eighties. And I was trying to sort of make a hybrid of the two worlds together. So, you know, ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’, when you look at it, it's… in some ways it's quite a cheesy musical and in some ways it's quite cutting edge hip hop theatre. But it's kind of both. And I think that's a reflection of who I am and where I'm from and what my influences were.

Lou: Okay. And who do you want to tell these stories to? Does that matter to you?

Kate: I've always wanted to make the theatre going experience less of an elite experience, and specifically to try and get young people into the theater.

I think… growing up, I'd lived near Southampton, in the New Forest and I would come to London probably once a year. And the thing that we would do was go and see a West End show. So I saw, in the eighties, things like ‘Cats’, ‘Starlight Express’, which had a massive impact on me. And I would have the program and I would keep the program and I would read it from cover to cover.

And I was sold on this idea, this thing, this world of theatre, it can inspire and motivate something in people that is really special and really rare. And then I sort of realized, ‘Oh, not everyone gets to do that’. That's a really… that’s quite an elite thing, mostly because of ticket pricing. And sometimes because it's not part of a normal culture that you would buy into. So when we started making things, I was trying to think, how do I get young people in and how do I make it accessible to them? Well one, it has to be that ticket prices have got to be reasonable. But two, it's got to be material that they might actually be interested in, that they might engage with.

And if it can have a political message and have some heart to it and make them think about something a bit deeper, then that's the icing on the cake of that. So, make them be able to afford a ticket, make it be something they want to see, and get them in the door, or at least even if they don't want to see it, that their teacher thinks they might want to see.

Cause we have a lot of school groups that are brought to our shows. And quite often you have moody teenagers who don't want to be there, but by the end, they're on their feet screaming, which I love. And then try and tell the stories that I think are really important. And you know, using dance and music and art, to tell a story that's political and relevant makes it interesting to people who maybe feel like either politics intimidates them or… I often felt like I wasn't smart enough to get politics, that I couldn’t engage in a political conversation with people because they would know more than me.

So I would distance myself from politics so as not to seem stupid, but the older I've gotten, the more I learn, the more I can see there are ways to make politics simpler and to make it easier and more relevant. So that's very much what I think I've been trying to do with the productions that we make.

Lou: I think the same could be said of dance., no? That it can be quite intimidating and exclusive and people aren't sure if their response is the right response and that kind of thing. And I can see that what you're doing is not like that. It's trying to welcome people in and make them feel at home and give them an experience that they understand and enjoy.

Kate: I’m going to take my polo back out again, sorry! Yeah, I think… I definitely think like if you're maybe taken to the Royal Opera House to see a ballet and you've never been to anything like that before, you could feel intimidated by the building, by how other people are dressed, by the silence, the formality. And we've worked at the Royal Opera House and they were wonderful, wonderful institution to work for.

And I loved being there. And when we first opened there, our audiences were so quiet and I thought it meant our show was a stinker. I was like, ‘Oh God, they don't get it and it's rubbish’ - It's just that they're really polite. And they would clap at the end and ‘bravo’ and ‘lovely’, but it's not… wasn't what we were used to, which is quite loud.

Lou: Yeah, well, that's great that you're there to, you know, rock things up a little bit, I guess. And did you find that you could get a different audience into the opera house? Or not so much?

Kate: I think that if I'm right in saying, and I'd need to check in with them, but I think what happened when we were there… we did it twice, so we did it in their Linbury Studio, and then they produced it for a second time and put it in the Round House, still produced by the Royal Opera House. When we were in the Linbury Studio, we tend to have very late ticket buyers. So when we were on sale at the Peacock, it generally looks like, ‘we're not selling, we're not selling it, we're not selling, we're not selling’ - it's open! And then it goes ‘sell, sell, sell, sell, sell’. There’s a lot on the day, like a lot of walk-ups. And I think what happened at the Royal Opera House is that it's a small venue at Linbury, relatively small, and all their regular ticket buyers booked ahead. So the majority was their normal audience, but in every show we'd probably get like between maybe 5 to 20 of our audience. Who would be the only people who'd be going like, ‘Yeah!’, making loads of noise, to the point that sometimes we'd be like, ‘Oh god’. But when we went to the round house, it was different. It was a much more diverse audience.

Lou: And I can see why you'd take that work there. It feels like a, yeah, a very natural home for it. Okay. So, how does this work get made then? Do you start with your story at home, you've developed that and you're quite clear about your structure, or do you have a broad theme and you go into the studio and you mess around with the dancers and see what comes up and find them the detail and the structure there?

Kate: I think the first thing is getting the commission in the first place. So in order to do that, I've got to have a really pitchable story. Mostly I will approach with an idea… sometimes it's the other way round, for example, with the Royal Opera House again, they were doing a ballet of Alice in Wonderland and they thought it'd be nice to have a ZooNation take on Alice in Wonderland in the Linbury at the same time and to link the two productions together.

So two very different versions of the Alice story. So I was given the subject matter and asked to come up with a take on it. And I'm, you know, I'm a big advocate for talking openly about mental health and I thought that when I got into the material and it seemed to be something that would be a really good vehicle for opening up conversations around mental health. But yeah, once I've got the commission, I'll then spend a long time researching and writing on that story.

Lou: So that's actually home alone, that's not in a studio

Kate: That’s home alone, yeah, I spend months just writing. And then once I've got a structure and I'm, you know, I start working with different people in the different creative departments, and expanding until you've really got a very good script. As in like a, you know, a very… quite finished script and then we’d workshop, it would definitely be workshopped before we get to rehearsals.

And after workshops, we'll go back to start again and make changes. And then a lot of stuff changes in the room, always. But I always go in with the structure. Before I put anything on the floor, I’ll lay it out, like a visual scene or a play first so that we are marking all the points of the story beats that we need to hit before we start turning it into choreography.

Lou: And when you start turning it into choreography, you start at the beginning or you…

Kate: I like to work chronologically. Because I think, well, for me, it saves time. If you're working chronologically, you've got to work out the flow of one to the next, and quite often you could make all your pieces and then put them together and realize that it's just really clunky and there's no connection between the two. And, you know, every show that I've done with ZooNation has had a different format in terms of choreography. So something like ‘Message in a Bottle’, I was the choreographer and I actually was the choreographer and I worked with an associate who was Lukas McFarlane.

So he contributed creatively, and then I had several assistants on it in different styles, but I was the lead choreographer. So I was making and collaborating on everything. And on some shows, I've done things like ‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’, I would’ve… say, there's 20 numbers in the show, I might have done seven of those numbers and the other numbers I'd have staged them.

So I'd have staged the structure, the story, the moving of set pieces, the moment of drama, where there needs to be a big lift, when I knew there was a diagonal line across the stage because of this and I'd stage it all, and then I'd hand it to someone else and say, ‘Okay, now take that and turn it into steps’.

And in ‘Mad Hatter’, different members of the company did a different number each. So they all worked on different numbers. But then on ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’, there were I think, 5 credited choreographers, myself being one of them. So again, out of 20 numbers on that, those 20 numbers were divided between 5 people.

I'd always stage them and stage… I always stage the story and the drama and the formations, but the actual steps, I try and get other choreographers to work on it because my language of dance is limited and where I have strengths in some areas, I know that there are people who are better than me in other areas. So I would always try and get that diversity of physical language by having different contributing choreographers.

Lou: Okay. And how do you decide which bits you’ll do which bits they’ll do? Do you just decide?

Kate: I look at which bits play to my strengths. So which bits… and usually the bits I take are the ones that are most musical theatre, the comedy bits or the really heavy storytelling bits, or quite often the sad bits I do as well.

But if it's… for example, if it was a locking number, I'd get Tommy Franzen to do it because he's better than me. And I might do some bars of locking and it'd be my language, but I’d do them with Tommy and I'd say like, ‘I'm going to do this, this, this, and this’, and he'd do it, and I'd say ‘do you feel that… does that feel good in your body? Should we change this phrase here? Would you like a different move here?’ You know, so we make it together.

Lou: It's an interesting model of collaboration I'm quite used, of course, to choreographers setting tasks, dancers creating movement. And so they're authoring the dance language. Not so used to that, to you bringing in another choreographer or using one of the dancers to choreograph.

Kate: I think that quite often people are uncredited.

Lou: I was going to ask you how do you credit it, yeah? Kate: Yeah, so we have different credits that you can have in a ZooNation production. So Lukas McFarlane was the associate choreographer on that, Carrie-Anne Ingrouille was associate choreographer on Sylvia. If you're an associate, it means that you are contributing creative content.

If you're an assistant, then you're assisting the choreographer to come up with creative content, or you might just be billed as a choreographer. So on ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’, Carrie and Tommy and myself were the three billed choreographers. And then it said additional choreography by Duane Taylor and Ryan Chappell, but between the five of us, the language of choreography is really broad.

I'm a really big believer of trying to credit people who've actually made the choreography. So much so that I'm always a bit paranoid that people might think that I'm trying to take credit for choreography that wasn't mine. I don't want to, and I don't need to, like, I'm good at some stuff and I'm not good at some stuff.

And I know that I've got limitations. I'm always learning, but I’m also getting older. How relevant can I keep being in a culture that's always evolving? And moves are really coming from young people. You know, I'm 45. I'm not the dancer I used to be. I'm not as fit as I used to be. I'm not as involved in that dance community as I used to be since I've become a mum and I've kind of spent a lot more time at home.

So, yeah, and I also like the idea of trying to bring up other choreographers, give them opportunities. Someone like Rhimes, the client who I worked with a lot, and she's been the associate on the West End production of ‘Jamie’ and on the movie of ‘Jamie’, and she then took over as resident director of ‘Some Like it Hip Hop’ on the remap.

And she's brilliant. She's amazing. She's so talented. She doesn't need me. But through doing work with me, I'm helping her to get to a point where she can then go into someone's office and go, ‘Look, I've worked on this production, I've worked on this production, I've done this. These are my credentials. Now hire me.’, which is what's happened to Carrie-Anne as well, because she's now the choreographer of ‘Six’ and she's been nominated for an Olivier award.

She’d have got there, whatever route she'd have taken, whether it was working with me or working with someone else, cause she's amazing. But I really want to bring through these other talented women and men.

Lou: Yeah. Okay. It's nice that you do that. I know it's not always the case, is it, and even if that's not, you know, in bad faith, it's still often the case that the choreographer…well, there's one choreographer and there's the phrase that ‘dancers are contracted for erasure’. So they will come along, rock up, bring their material, do their best, but actually it's signed by just one person.

Kate: You know, I don't understand that though. Because choreography isn't… I know choreography isn't just steps. I get that. But making up steps is choreography. It is part of choreography. So I would, for me, like, I would say I'm the director of the piece. But if I didn't choreograph every single step in that piece, I'm not the sole choreographer.

Lou: It's an interesting take on… I think it's about the definition of choreographer. I do work with people who actually don't create any of the steps, but they create the tasks that lead to them, they elicit the movement, they evolve the movement, they frame it, et cetera. And I feel like the term is still theirs. But yes, I have also been in situations where it doesn't feel quite right that somebody isn't credited for going beyond the role of just, whatever that means, a dancer.

Kate: I guess I’ve heard a lot of dancers moaning as well in the past saying, you know, ‘I did this job and this guy asked me to make up, you know, the chorus and I did, and now that chorus is in a music video’, and this guy is getting those of work off the back of it, but you didn't even make it up. Or, you know, that's not a specific, that's just like a made up example. But I mean, I don't actually know which choreographers make up their own steps and which don't. I'm not really, I'm not aware of that.

I don't know the processes of other choreographers. I just… and I think we in ZooNation, we're not from a from a contemporary dance background or a ballet background. We're mostly from the music industry background, where people were working as backing dancers. So, I guess we kind of come at it from a different point of view. I guess, maybe I'm used to more this idea of whether you're a director or whether you're a choreographer or on a musical… the director would be doing all those things that you said your choreographer is doing.

You know, coming up with the tasks, you know, prompting the movement. That's something a director would do, but unless you're actually on the floor and moving and stepping and coming up with those moves, are you choreographing it? I don't know, for me, no.

Lou: Yeah. Okay. I think, I think you're right, I think it's about the specific little area of the sector, but I do think in contemporary dance, it's not that they're not on the floor and they're not moving.

But yeah, they're not always authoring, and sometimes that's acknowledged and sometimes it isn't, and of course it's difficult to acknowledge. That's a lot of words. So I think sometimes it's just laziness maybe, or lack of thought, but yeah, certainly I've heard bad feelings sometimes, but I think people get round it with, ‘performed and created by…’

So ‘choreographed by’ and ‘performed and created’, that kind of thing. But they don't get more money for that, but again, they're contracted for that. They knew what they were doing when they signed up. And it's a way of working. I don't think it's… it's very rarely a, sort of, a question of bad faith.

Kate: What happened on the ‘Mad Hatter's Tea Party’ was that the company were credited as being the choreographers of the piece, because every member of the company contributed to it. So, and you know, there's lots of… there's many, many different models. And I also know, I'll see dancers freestyling in the room and I'll see them do something and I'll be like, ‘Ooh, what was that? That was good’. And, you know, and then we might be inspired to take that one move or that idea and then build something around it.

So there's lots of gray areas within that. I think that's… if you actually turn around to a dancer and say, ‘There's four eights here, could you make something up?’, you're asking them to choreograph.

Lou: When they are credited as choreographer, do they get royalties?

Kate: It depends on the production and whether there are royalties to be had. Most of our productions… we're a subsidized, small company, we’re a charity. The royalties are a long way off ever being able… because we're not making money.

So I think I'd have to, I'd have to pull Chantal Spiteri and ask her, on each production what the royalty agreement has been for everybody.

Lou: Okay. Can we talk about how you balance your roles? Obviously you're a leader, and an artist and a woman and a mum - in the dance sector. And also actually in the hip hop sector, which I don't know how common it is to be a woman in that and also a white woman… but actually I'm getting carried away.

My question is really about balancing the leadership role with the creative role, and how you have experienced that as a woman in this sector these days. Does it feel difficult? Do you feel like you're battling against something or do you feel like… that you're not?

Kate: You know what’s really weird in my mind at the moment? I'm really conscious of two movements. I'm conscious of… the MeToo movement and the feminist movement and the desire to eradicate a systemic problem within dance and within many, many industries, all industries - of women being inferior and being underpaid, and there being a systemic problem.

And at the same time, I'm really conscious of the fact that I'm Caucasian and that I have huge privilege. So I can't say that things have been difficult or they've been hard because they've been both, because where they've been very, very easy for me as a white woman to walk out into the world and go, you know… and a woman of privilege in many ways, you know, my father did alright for himself.

I went to a private school. I had a good start in life. And I've hidden from that in the past, but I think we have to be much more open and truthful about who we are and where we come from. I've tried to do the best I can with the start that I've had in life. And I've tried to not make it just be about my own personal gain.

I've faced loads of challenges from being a woman, that I wouldn't have faced if I was a man and I've had loads of easy opportunities open to me from being white that I wouldn't have if I was black. So it's this, you know, and we've got to… well, I'm gesturing with my hands, it's like, there's a balance for me that I want to improve both situations.

And that's… and our work with ZooNation is genuinely trying to improve both those situations. Lou: Okay. And I, you know, I hear what you're saying. You’re right to recognize your privilege and, yeah, that's the right thing to do. But I'm interested in whether the sector… the ways in which the sector is not treating women… we'll talk about other things in a minute, but not treating women the same way as it's treating men, whether that's in terms of opportunity or money, status, I don’t know.

Kate: I think there’s a perception about women being in charge. I know that in… the last time I looked up these statistics was when ‘Everybody's Talking About Jamie’ was nominated at the Olivier awards and I had a nomination for it.

And I started looking at how many women had been nominated for Olivier awards versus men. And then I looked at a statistic I was given, actually I think by my father-in-law, which said the 90% of participants across all dance activities in the UK are female, but over 80% of leaders in dance across all dance activities are male.

So when you look at that discrepancy, it shows that it is, this word that we hear so often now; it's systemic. There's a problem in the system of dance, when men are rising to the top, whether it's to run large organizations, to be artistic directors, to be choreographers, they are rising to the top and women aren’t.

Now it can't just be because we have children. And in a society where a lot of parenting is 50-50, male-female, it can't just be because we have children… and we don't get lobotomies when we have children, you know, we're still perfectly capable of being bright. It takes a bit of time after you've had a kid, but you can still use your brain.

And so it can't be that and I really experienced a really brilliant support from the director of ‘Everybody's Talking About Jamie’, who approached me… I think my daughter was maybe two, and he approached me… I didn't know him. And he said, you know, ‘I’d really like you to choreograph this show up in Sheffield, Sheffield Crucible’.

And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I've got a two year old daughter and I live in London, so, no’, and he came back to me and said, ‘What would it take for you to do it?’ And I was like, ‘Well, it’s not more money, that's not what this is about’, I said, ‘it's the practicality of it’. I know what it's like doing a musical.

You're at the beck and call of the producer, director, six days a week for months, you know? And I can't do that. I'm not prepared to do that. And if that means my career goes down, then that’s the way it is. and I'd had that experience when I did ‘The X Factor’ musical which was the last big West End musical I'd done.

And I… all I could think was I can't sign up to a project like that and be a mum. I can't do that. I don't want to do that. I’d miss her too much. I don't want to miss these days. And so Jonathan was like, ‘Okay, so how many days a week could you do?’ and I said, ‘Well, you know, it's not just that you're in Sheffield, I'm in London’.

He said, ‘Well, what if rehearsals were in London?’, I was like, ‘Okay...’, and he said, ‘What if you did, you know, not full a week?’ and I said, ‘Well, maybe two or three days a week?’, and he said, ‘Yeah, what if you did that?’, and that's what we did. He moved rehearsals to London. I did two days, like in the middle of the week. And then I did a Saturday, when my husband was at home, so she was with her dad and we made it work. And then rehearsals moved up to Sheffield, and again, I was kept for three days and they took me up and down to Sheffield and put me in a hotel. And then I had one week at the end of that for tech and my husband and daughter were brought up and put in a hotel with me.

Lou: Amazing.

Kate: They made it work. And so what I really love about that is that Jonathan valued me enough to see me as a mother, to see me in this situation where my daughter was more important than the work, but I was more important to him than… I guess the view of what you have to do to do musical. And about a year later, I was offered another West End show and I said, ‘Okay, you know, I've got a three year old daughter, are you prepared to be flexible? This is what I did on ‘Everybody's Talking About Jamie’’ and they said, ‘Absolutely not, no, we can't possibly, musicals can't work like that. We can't do that. We need you to be available to us whenever we need you. We need you in the room’.

And I was like, ‘You don't, actually’. Because I’ve seen that you don't actually need me in the room all the time. And then moving forward, even on every version of ‘Jamie’ and on other jobs, working with associates and residents who you really trust has also enabled me to go, ‘Well, you're not going to get me today, you're going to get my associates, the work will still be done. She knows the show. I've made the steps, or I've worked it out with her, but I'm being a mum today’. So, and I find a real opposition to that and a real warmth to that. And I'm hoping that the warmth for that will grow.

Lou: Good for him for being flexible, I mean, good for you that he wanted you that much but also great that he was prepared to be that flexible.

I wonder if we've all learned a little bit about flexibility in the past couple of months and maybe going forward that will change. You realize that you can do more digitally, you know, online. And that maybe… I mean, some people aren't going to change, you know, there will still be jobs that will expect you there the whole time, but it is possible that yeah, there will be more flexible arrangements available in the future because we've all realised that when you have to, you can adapt.

Kate: Yeah, I hope so. I think with meetings as well, I don't know about you, but I think going to meetings physically is a massive waste of time and it's bad for the planet. So why don't we all meet like this on Zoom?

Not every time because there's value in actually being in a space with people, but let's say if we all did half the meetings we did. It'd be so much better.

Lou: Yeah, absolutely and you know, yes; lots of people are having this conversation now about it; ‘Oh look, it's really fine’. And you know, I've always done quite a lot online, but certainly not all of it and often not when it's about actual rehearsals. But yes, so much is possible. And also I think there's a kind of… maybe now we’ll feel less shame about saying, ‘Do you know what? I don't want to come to that meeting physically because I just want to be online. It doesn't mean I don't care, it doesn't mean I'm bad at my job, it just makes more sense’, and the arguments for why it makes more sense will be more credible now, maybe. Or maybe that will last a couple of months and then it will get back to normal. Okay. So the other big change that we're witnessing, hoping for, is of course inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, and all the hideous events that have taken place there, but that are hopefully leading towards something more positive.

And of course the ZooNation is a massively diverse organization. I just want to clarify what I mean by that, what I think, I mean by that, so that the work is intended to be accessible to those with and without prior knowledge of dance, as you say, that your dance language is hip hop or a variation of, so it's not a codified, exclusive, historically-privileged genre.

You work with lots of young people. I know the company does lots of outreach work from lots of a variety of backgrounds. And also, yes, of course the work is hugely inspired by Black culture and Black and Brown artists and music and dance forms, et cetera. So, you know, it's all there. But I want to ask you, how has it been for you in the past few weeks as all of this has been unfolding? How’s it been for the company, and have you learned anything whilst this has happened?

Kate: I mean, I think what I've learned is that I don't know anything. I think I thought that because of the nature of the work that we make, the subject matter, the diversity of our companies, the diversity of our audiences that we really, you know, were on this path… not changing the world, but doing in what my eyes is, the right thing. But, it's not enough, even just doing what we do is not enough.

Do you know, it's hard talking about it without feeling like I'm repeating things I've heard other people say as well, because I've watched so many things online now, and when you talk about… ‘I've got so much to learn’; well, yes, I do have so much to learn, that as someone who is white, that I can never understand racism. And I know that, that I can still stand as I've always done to try and stop racism. I can try and challenge people through the work that we make.

But it's still just... it doesn't feel like it's enough, and partly I think that's because the kind of people who are coming to see our shows aren’t actually the kind of people whose minds we need to change, because they wouldn't be coming to see our shows, if they weren't already of a mindset, that… was on, for me, the right side of right and wrong.

And that’s not everyone. And I think actually, the exception of that with our shows is ‘Message in a Bottle’, maybe. And maybe, I don't know, it depends, you know, depends on the institution. Cause I feel like, at Sadler’s Wells, we get a much more Black audience that comes to see our work at Sadler’s Wells, and at the Old Vic and the Royal Opera House, much less so.

So maybe we are challenging people there. And maybe… it's not so simple as left wing and right wing, is it? Or, you know, liberal and conservative, it's... the audiences that we get at the Old Vic are going to be more mixed, I guess. And we did have some criticism at the Old Vic that we had, Black actors cast as Churchill and as Emmeline Pankhurst.

So, you know, I definitely think we're brave with the work that we do. We're not scared to try and talk about difficult things in our work. But I think we’re trying to look at the moment at how… what we can do that is more than just the work that we make, more than the education programs that we do.

And the thing we've identified, where we don't have diversity at all is really behind the scenes. Now, whether it's on a West End musical or whether it's… most of the time on a ZooNation production, when I look at the creative team, the lighting designer, the set designer, the costume designer, they're normally… the technicians… it’s very Caucasian.

It's predominantly Caucasian and particularly in the West End. It's you know, 90%, 95% Caucasian… but these are brilliant careers. These are great jobs. They are for highly intelligent, creative, wonderful people to do these jobs. And we've tried before to launch an initiative to get, particularly because the ZooNation's work is influenced predominantly by Black culture, we've tried to do a behind-the-scenes initiative to give work placements to young Black people, to work in these behind the scenes areas. And we found it hard to find the young people, but we've relaunched that scheme. And we're going to try again.

And the idea is that we're going to pair up… probably around the age of sort of 15-16, where young people are still trying to work out what opportunities there are for them out there, to try and get them at that age, to come and be paired with someone that I find for them that is in one of these skillsets, to give them a week's introduction on being a lighting designer or one of these, being a company manager, being an assistant stage manager, being an electrician backstage. All these different jobs to get them at that age, so that they then can train appropriately for that job, because I know that people have talked about these schemes before.

What we’ve found is that people who are coming out of university and graduating well, there isn't a diversity there. There's a little bit, but there isn't a huge amount of diversity there. So you can't take those graduates and put them into employment. You've got to get them younger so that they're coming through and we can support them coming through.

I mean, I'm just talking just in the sense of what our industry is and what we can do as a company that makes theatre and makes dance, of what we can do to better our own practices within that.

Lou: I think that’s a really good example of a really practical thing. And you say you've tried it before and it, you know, it's difficult, obviously these things don't happen overnight, but you're trying again.

And for me, that's a great… I think it's really spot on observation, and it's a very practical thing that you can do that across time will have impact, I think, you know, massive impact. And, you know, again, in all the conversations that I'm hearing, some of which are incredibly inspiring right now and some of which are, you know, just depressing and scary, it's strangely rare to hear actual plans, you know, there's a lot of rhetoric and just… I'm constantly looking for the, ‘Well, actually we're doing this, and actually we’re going to do that’.

Kate: Yeah, there’s a lot of, ‘We need to do better’

Lou: Yeah, that’s fair enough, I guess. We’re slow, aren’t we, we’re steel ships trying to turn and it's difficult. And, you know, we're taking on a lot at the moment, although I'm, you know, I'm not justifying us… yeah, but we’re really slow. I mean, let's face it, hundreds and hundreds of years. But yeah, the point is that it’s a great example of a practical scheme.

Kate: What's hard at the moment is with COVID-19… if Covid didn't exist, I could be several weeks into relaunching that scheme again now, because I would have all these people I know, wonderful people… I was talking to Anna Fleischle yesterday, a set and costume designer, and she was so up for it. And she's also trying to do something similar.

We were talking about it… but we were like, ‘But we've got no work…’, so we can't, there's nothing actually tangible at the moment. We'd be promising young people, ‘One day, if we have work again, we will do this’, which is not the same as saying ‘I've got a project that's in rehearsal for three months’.

Lou: No, it's not, but would we be having these conversations if it wasn't for COVID-19, you know, of course, you know, George Floyd would probably have lost his life, but would there have been the space for people to go, ‘Oh, hold on a minute, enough’s enough’. So all we can do right now, is think, and you've got to think… we've got to think as best we can. And as practically as we can.

Kate: Yeah. And I think as someone who is Caucasian, I think that I get asked about race and diversity a lot, because of the company and what the company does and the diversity within our company. But I instantly feel scared that I'm going to say the wrong thing. And I've tried to change that mindset now; to speak.

And if I say the wrong thing, that's good because someone will correct me and I will learn and the more I learn, the less scared I will be to say the wrong thing, because I'll actually understand what the right thing and the wrong thing is. And that's better than, you know… and it's not that I've not been outspoken, god, we've had so much racist abuse over the years.

And I say, we, because it's… obviously it's not aimed at me. It's aimed at the people that they see on stage and with our involvement in the Olympics, when we arrived in the West End, the BNP, even journalists, like the racist attack on the company and still even now at the Old Vic with, like I said, with the Churchill and Emmeline Pankhurst and you know… it’s always been that way. So it’s not something that we're not familiar with. But I think how we handle it going forward will be different.

Lou: Okay. I'm sorry, I'm so naive that that really shocks me because I haven't had the experience in it. I don't live the life you live. And I can't believe that's a part of the company's life. Kate: Do you know what the thing is, it’s one thing being upset for my company, but I can only feel an ounce of what they must feel like. You know, even when we were announced to go to Beijing, the things that were written about this very beautiful company of dancers who were currently on stage at the Novello… there was one article that said in a review, an article about ZooNation doing ‘Into the Hoods’ at the Novello in 2008, the headline was ‘The Barbarians are at the Gate’. And it said Ivan Novello would be turning in his grave if he knew what was on his stage and the… not even thinly veiled racism through the article was just palpable. And then we got announced to go to Beijing and there literally, and this was really upsetting and it's very offensive, but people who are listening need to know that this has been said, but they said that ZooNation were just a bunch of gorillas and that there's a zoo in Beijing. When we go there, why don't they just lock us all up and leave us there? Those were the kinds of attacks the cast were getting, and then going out on stage and performing to a predominantly white West End theater.

Lou: Jesus Christ. Sorry, that story, where did that come from?

Kate: That one, I think was the BNP. I mean, it doesn't surprise me, right? Like it's the BNP, but I think that one was, but there were so many at the time. And there was an article that was in the Guardian that talked about ZooNation's involvement in the Olympics and it, I think it referred to us as maybe a gang or a crew, not a dance company. And it said that we promote drug culture, because there's… you know the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and Jack has magic beans?

Well in our version of, ‘Into the Hoods’, there's a giant, and the giant’s like a pimp, and he sells some drugs. You know, yeah. So, I think it was the Guardian, but don't quote me on that… no it was the Guardian because they apologized and they let me write a letter, which was then printed in the Guardian.

They kind of corrected what had been said about the company and what we stood for, you know, and then you get this other end of the spectrum. And I'm talking a lot about this, but it's a big thing for us for such a long time that ZooNation were picked to go to Beijing, to represent the UK, to be in front of millions, all around the world, to be dancing around a red double Decker bus recreating London in the Beijing arena.

And, you know, people were saying, we're not British, we don't represent the UK, all this stuff. And at the same time, there was a press conference. And I was meant to be speaking at the press conference to represent ZooNation, to talk about our work. And they replaced me at the last minute. And very openly said, ‘You can't actually speak for the company, we need a Black male to speak for the company’.

And I understood that they were ticking boxes and I want them to tick that box, and it's good that they tick that box, but it's this crazy world that we live in where, you know, when it's all these different levels of things going on at the same time.

And I spoke to one of the dancers, Pete, and said, ‘Look, would you be at this press conference? And I want you to know that they don't want me. And that's fine, even though I started the company, it's my company. I've grown it from the roots up, but they don't want me. And that's fine. I'm happy with that. I'm absolutely fine with that. But you need to know that the reason they want you is because you're Black’. And you can see that in a positive way. And you can see that in a negative way. And maybe it's both, but I just wanted him to know, you know, why it was, and he did it and he was happy to do it.

But it was a really confusing time. It's like, they love us, they hate us, you know, it was… yeah. But things have changed a lot, but in some ways they haven't changed at all.

Lou: It's extraordinary and I am horribly naive. But at least these conversations are, you know, are making Lou less naive, so that's okay – no! But you know, we are… and as you say, I think the idea that you're becoming less fearful about getting things wrong because we all have to know that we're not done learning. And we're not… we haven't finished our thinking.

Kate: I want to be corrected because I want to try and understand better, how people feel. And, yeah, you know, yeah. Just… we've still just got a long wait to go, like, even when you think your heart is in the right place and you feel like your actions over 20 years have been in the right place, I am not perfect. I'm still getting it wrong and I still need to do better.

Lou: Yeah. And also, you know, got a long career ahead in which to do that. And if you were, again, if you were done... then what would be the point in carrying on, but to keep learning, keep changing, keep listening and keep making work that speaks to people. I guess that's all you can do really. Isn't it?

Kate: Well, that's what I was going to say about ‘Message in a Bottle’, was, the majority of our audience for ‘Message in a Bottle’ were Sting fans.

Lou: So that's an interesting side-step, in a way, yeah.

Kate: It's a very different, very, very different project for us. And mainly because I like to try and do different things, I don't want to just do the same thing over and over again.

Lou: Do you feel like you lost some of your usual audience?

Kate: Oh, yeah, and I wouldn't blame them. I wasn't, you know, it wasn't… we didn't produce it. So I don't think we would have produced that particular project, because I don't think it would sell so well to our audience, but, you know, we were looking at a much older audience demographically and a very, very white audience. But we were still telling a story that was about refugees and about displacement and, with a very diverse cast, trying to tell what was a true story.

Every bit of the story is based on something that actually happened to someone somewhere and a specific case. So maybe we are still trying to challenge how to get to people and challenge how they think.

Lou: Yeah. But the echo chamber is, you know, may well be the death of us all really? Because, you know, how do we have conversations with the people who don't want to listen to us and how… and especially with the economics of having to play at Sadler's, or, you know… how do we break out of these blessed buildings of, sort of, sacred heart and get out there while still working at this scale. And whilst still, you know, telling these stories.

Kate: Yes, we’ve had that conversation - my husband, he’s been having… I'm not on Facebook, I left years ago. My husband's still on Facebook and he keeps engaging into rants on Facebook with people who are being incredibly racist, people who he knows, people who he might've known through work, or he might have known from a very long time ago, but they are on his Facebook feed. And he got to the point the other day where he said, ‘I'm going to have to leave. I can't, I need to unfollow this person. I have to, I can't cope. I've tried everything. I've tried this, I've tried this, I've tried this and they just don't get it’.

And I said to him, ‘But how is that going to change things if you stop?’ Like, I said, ‘Rather than quit, rather than blocking, ask him to meet you for a cup of tea - when we're allowed to. Like, ask him to go for a cup of tea with you, take the conversation further, because if we just run away from the people that disagree with us…’. That's why I feel like sometimes at ZooNation, we're preaching to the converted because the kind of people who go, ‘Oh, it's ZooNation, that sounds fun’, then they might probably wouldn't come and see us if they were, you know, I don't know. Who knows.

Lou: Yeah. I think, I think it's probably true, but, we can keep trying to break out of that. I think, can't we, and it's true, you know, social media of course, is disastrous for that, but you know, you basically find a bunch of people that you can, you know, heatedly agree with as a pastime, you know. What everyone says is, you should go out and buy the Daily Mail. So, A) that means someone else isn't buying it and B) you get to see what's, you know… have the enemy in plain sight and get to see what people think.

Kate: Is that a thing though? Because surely if we buy the Daily Mail, the demand would just go up and they'll make more copies.

Lou: Well, the truth is, I think it's a thing people say not a thing people do. So I suspect, yeah.

Kate: You know, what's funny? So, I don't know you. And we have both gone into a conversation here, but we seem to be politically aligned. Now you might not have been, I made the assumption early on that you and I think along the same lines politically, but you might not have been, but is it because of the sector that we work in that we are?

Lou: Um, yes. I, you know, I know this isn't true, but I tend to find myself thinking that if you work in the arts, you are often left… you are left leaning, which in itself is problematic. And also isn't quite true, but it nearly is true. And, you know, of course I've seen your work, so I definitely make assumptions about you, but… yeah, I think we do.

And I think that when you have conversations that I'm, you know, one makes assumptions that you are going to, you know… I make assumptions that people are going to like my European badge on my coat, and then sometimes you go to a place and you think, ‘Oh, maybe that's not going to go down so well’.

Kate: We were in, I was actually on holiday with people once… we realized, they were friends of someone else, and we realized that they had voted for Brexit. My husband and I were like, ‘What are we going to do?’ How will we… how is this going to go down? Because we're furious about it. And we rant about it every single day. And we've got to now spend time with these people and find a way to see past that and to like them, because really, if you get engaged in a political debate on holiday where you can't get away from each other and you're not even direct friends, you're friends through someone else; very, very awkward. I don't know. It's so difficult, isn’t it.

Lou: It's, yeah, it's, you know, I totally share that, but it's not great, is it, to only want to be surrounded by people that think what you think. You know, we have family… we have American family, and a Trump voter in the family. And I say to my son, ‘We love them despite their politics’. We have to, so…

Kate: My father and I aren't politically aligned. My dad's a Tory and I'm the opposite. And it's hard. It's really, really, really, really hard because I love him and he's my dad. And I don't agree with him and he doesn't agree with me. He must look at me in the same way, right, and think, ‘Oh my daughter, what she's thinking, what she doing? What does she represent? She's out there using my name. Doing all this stuff’. And, you know, we just don't agree.

Lou: It seems such a shame that disagreement is seen as negative, you know, within a family, with mine certainly it was, but also within a venue or a post-show discussion, you know, why must we all be complicit with something?

Why can't we embrace difference for real, and try to dig in a bit more deeply into it? You know, the thing is that people don't change their minds, so actually I find it redundant. My husband's a great discusser and I tend to talk with people who agree with me because I don't enjoy trying to change anybody's mind because I won't, I guess, you know, but that's a negative thing. The point is to hear eachother.

Kate: I get really stressed when my family talk politics, my husband and my dad, like the amount of times, even this weekend, I can see, you know, through my teeth, going to my husband, ‘Don't mention it. Don't mention it. Don't do it. Don't do it’, oh no, here it comes. The political rows between people, I find hard. What I find easy is making a bold political statement on stage and then going, ‘Discuss that’, but I get really stressed, particularly with family members and friends, when they disagree politically, I find that really, really hard. I need to get more resilient.

Lou: Yeah. It's a shame, isn't it? I'm the same, but it's not the way ahead, I suppose. Anyway, I'm going to have stop us because we're running out of time, but I'm just going to do a couple of really quick, quick fire questions. Where am I going to start? Okay. What are you not very good at within your job?

Kate: Within my job? Listening.

Lou: That's very honest.

Kate: So I have a really, really, really, really, really bad, annoying, frustrating attention span. It's very short. I'm a bit of a goldfish and… people need my time. They need my attention. They'll wait. They'll book a moment in my lunch break or a phone call to get my time and attention and they'll start. And then they'll be like ‘Back in the room, Kate! I've lost you haven’t I’, and I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking about that and then that and then that’, because I think I get in a state of chaos when I'm trying to work something out.

Lou: And your brain is going quickly.

Kate: My thoughts fly and I find it hard to stop them. And then when people start talking with me, particularly if it's not something directly related to the creation, if it's maybe at the deadline for the program being printed or something like that, I can’t take it in, but I do it in my house with my husband and my family, they’re always like, ‘Come on! Listen!’. So listening is my worst.

Lou: If you had to have the same number of dancers in every show you ever make in the future, how many dancers would that be?

Kate: 30

Lou: Nice. That’s very practical, small-scale!

Kate: One day I'll get that many.

Lou: One day you will. How many of you had, how many is the most?

Kate: 16’s the most.

Lou: Okay, nice. Yeah, 30, I look forward to seeing it. Do you have a secret specialist subject?

Kate: Do I have a secret specialist subject?

Lou: Is there something that you know a lot about?

Kate: Probably ‘The West Wing’.

Lou: Oh, very good, there you go. Okay, for when you’re on ‘Mastermind’.

Kate: I think I've watched it all the way through seven times. That's seven seasons of ‘The West Wing’ and I've been all the way through. And even during pregnancy, I went through it again and even in labor, I was watching ‘The West Wing’. It calms me down.

Lou: Yeah, very nice. And you enjoyed it so much that you barely noticed giving birth to your daughter.

Kate: I had an epidural, so I was alright.

Lou: Oh, you were fine. Right, okay. Final one. Is there anything you want to do in dance that you haven't yet done?

Kate: Yeah loads. I want to make a film, or a high-end television series that involves dance. That's something that I actually write and direct.

Lou: And when you say film, you mean a movie? Kate: I’m close, I’m not far off it, but I'm not there.

Lou: You mean a movie?

Kate: Either a film or a series. Yeah. I'd rather do a series these days because I think I prefer watching them.

Lou: With dancing? Ah, that's exciting. I've always wondered why there isn’t more of that.

Kate: I'm going to get there before I'm 50.

Lou: Amazing. That's really exciting. Yeah. I've always wondered why there wasn't more of that. I remember Hal Hartley, do you know Hal Hartley, he's American I think, film director, and he just occasionally puts a tiny bit of dancing and I just think that’s so wonderful and so rare, and certainly on television it's, you know, it's either Strictly or with drama, isn't it? It's never… how exciting! I look forward to seeing it.

Kate: One day.

Lou: One day. Okay, Kate, thank you so much. It's been really nice chatting. I feel like…

Kate: I’ve got no idea what I’ve said, but I wonder if my comments on what is a choreographer and what isn't, it might be slightly controversial, but they do come from a place of not knowing what other choreographers practices are…

Lou: Do you know - but that’s one of the things, I have this weird job where I see so many different choreographers at work, but nobody else does, and people say to me, ‘What's it like in that room?’ But the thing is, there isn’t any right. You're talking with care.

Kate: People always say that about art; that there's no right and wrong.

Lou: You're talking with care and you’re respecting your dancers.

Kate: I do give credit where credit's due.

Lou: Well, that's clearly what you're doing, so I don't think it's controversial, I just think it's personal and I thank you for sharing it.

Okay. Thank you so much for your time. It's been really great to talk.

Kate: Thank you, it’s been lovely to meet you properly and thank you, thanks for having me on.