The award-winning choreographer who fell foul of the mob

Ebullient, articulate and eminently sensible, Rosie Kay never wanted to be a martyr to the culture wars. A modern dance choreographer with an impressive track record – including 5 Soldiers, an award-winning exploration of army life, contributions to the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics and a fellowship at Oxford – she would rather be getting on with the business of creating new work for her small dance company. But she’s been given no choice – and all because of a party she held in August 2021 at her home in Birmingham.

Half-way through rehearsals for a new production of Romeo and Juliet, Kay felt that the dancers were struggling with morale after lockdown and that it would be nice to socialise. Things got well-lubricated after midnight, ‘and we were all on edge, tired and vulnerable’. ‘My husband wanted to kick everyone out, but my manager at the time thought we should keep the cast there to stop them going clubbing and risk contracting Covid,’ she said.

When Kay was asked, that night, about her plans to stage a dance version of Orlando – Virginia Woolf’s journey through gender and history – non-binary members of the cast told her that only a trans performer should play the title role. Kay disagreed, asserting her belief in biological sex differences and the right to single-sex safe spaces. ‘Looking back, perhaps that was naive. I could feel the atmosphere getting passive-aggressive. But I hadn’t started the discussion, my views were open and well-known, and I thought it was a free country.’

She returned to work thinking that the ensuing argy-bargy would blow over. Instead, the dancers went to the company’s board with accusations that she had used the words ‘penis and vagina’ in ways that were found to be offensive and complaints that she had been intimidating and ‘marginalising’, ‘abusing her position of power’ and ‘causing a hostile work environment’. There were demands for her to be ‘re-educated’ in ‘gender intelligence’.

A probe was launched by Kay’s own board, who proved disappointingly unsupportive. She apologised for any upset caused and stressed the importance of respecting different viewpoints, but ‘I wasn’t going to apologise for my beliefs. I don’t fit into anybody’s box, and that’s the way I like it.’

The incident was eventually declared closed, but when the dancers launched an appeal, Kay stepped down from the company, no longer convinced that she could be herself if she remained. Her resignation would embroil her in a long and expensive legal battle to recover the rights to stage her own work. The one bright spot – somewhat unexpectedly, perhaps – was the attitude of Arts Council England, whose dance department proved ‘really good and helpful’.

Two years and a lot of soul-searching later, Kay wants to move on constructively from this debacle. So, together with Denise Fahmy, a fellow victim of thought-crime, she has started a campaign, Freedom in the Arts, which is dedicated to defending everyone’s right to express their views without fear of reprisal and articulating why that right is so important to the health of society.

There are plenty of similar manifestos out there – from Unesco outwards – but few of them have any teeth or traction. Kay emphasises that this will be ‘a project and a pressure group, not an organisation’. ‘We want to provide practical help and advice to those who have fallen foul of recrimination and abuse and may face employment tribunals,’ she says. ‘We’re hoping to build a network so that people can support each other and let them know that they haven’t gone mad or broken the law.

‘The arts are full of fear now, and I’ve become a sort of case worker for people in trouble because of their views. We need more protection, and we need more of us to stand up and say “No”, and we need arts organisations to think harder about what the principles of their mission are.’

What are those principles? ‘A former secret-service man told me that they were always interested in monitoring the arts because once they had clocked the obvious stance of the political activists, the artists were the free-thinkers, the trouble-makers, the subversives. And that’s what we’re meant to be, and that’s what a minority within the arts aren’t allowing us to be.’

Are there limits to that freedom? Would it be acceptable to propose that homosexuality should be illegal or that women should be forced to veil themselves? ‘That is something we want to explore,’ she says. ‘I think there are limits within the law, but we must be free to cause offence. There is just not enough questioning of orthodoxies. When I was researching the army for 5 Soldiers, I thought it would be the military who would be down on me. Not at all – it was the arts crowd who told me I shouldn’t go there.’

What disappoints her at this early stage is that so little interest has come from the left and organisations such as Liberty, Index on Censorship and Amnesty, ‘who should be on our side. I’m waiting for the Guardian to ask for an interview, but so far it’s been the Telegraph and the Times’ – and she’s even appeared with Andrew Doyle on GB News.

Although she admits to being ‘a bit of a political animal’, Kay doesn’t want the campaign to consume her altogether, so she’s started a new dance company, K2CO. In the pipeline are a television version of 5 Soldiers; a programme ‘all about beauty and joy’ that will tour from May; and a new large-scale show called The Dinner Party, partly ‘about what you’re not allowed to do anymore’. The vexed Orlando waits further down the line. ‘It hasn’t been commissioned by anyone yet, but it’s ready to go. I know what it smells and feels like.’

Her aesthetics are grounded in her rigorous training in the 1990s at the defunct London Contemporary Dance School, but the mood music is different now. ‘The Arts Council has really looked after me, but higher up, there’s a lack of leadership – the case for the arts just isn’t being made strongly enough. The amount of space for your actual ideas on the grant application is confined a few lines – everything is instrumental, the good you can do the community. There’s a culture of compliance and surveillance, and it’s gone too far.’

She is concerned about the declining level of arts education in state schools: ‘I learnt three instruments and sang in a choir, as well as mastering music theory – that’s unthinkable now.’ And her dance training has gone, too. ‘It used to be about learning ballet, Graham, Cunningham, Limon, all these different techniques – now it’s just one long noodle. The audition process was gruelling, but if you got through, your fees were paid, you went through hell and back, but you came out with rock-solid technique and knowledge. Now everything is down to retaining clients and customers. Nobody can be failed any more. My sneaky little gem of an idea is to set up a deeply old-fashioned Academy of Arts, where there would be life-drawing, ballet class, and philosophy and history classes.’ It sounds like one for King Charles.