The Sadler’s Wells Young Associates programme is dedicated to finding and fostering those young talents who are going to lead the way as the next generation of major choreographers and dance artists. The current class of 23/24 are currently in preparation for the debut presentation of their work at the Lilian Baylis Studio at Sadler’s Wells in Angel. In anticipation of the mixed bill, we caught up with the young choreographers to introduce themselves and learn about their exciting new works.

Maiya Leeke is a London-based choreographer, performer, and teacher whose work reflects her background as a jazz saxophonist and through being a contemporary dancer. Her choreographic practice is rooted in exploring the physical language of hope and freedom of her voice, uniquely questioning how a voice is more than spoken words.

Tell us about the piece you’ll be presenting in the Lilian Baylis Studio.
My new work for the Lilian Baylis Studio will explore how communication can be meaningful.

What was your first introduction to the world of dance?
I first began dancing when I was three years old, but I switched to studying music a few years later. As a teenager I came back to dance and realised I had a love for them both, which continues to this day!

Who are your biggest inspirations?
Music is my greatest source of inspiration and the foundation of how I build my work. My musical inspiration varies from jazz to classical to soul, and I take inspiration from the feeling the music communicates.

What do you think of choreography and dance in 2023?
I feel excited by the variety of ways dance can be seen nowadays. I am excited by the richness of bumping into live performance in everyday life as well as choosing to go to the theatre. For me, it helps keep dance alive and joyful.

What impact do you hope you will have on the UK dance scene?
I hope to be able to bring joy and allow people to connect and relate to the work I make.

Elisabeth Mulenga is a dance artist based in London. Her choreography comes from a practice of sensitivity and awareness, aiming to notice and give justice to the extremities and fullness of lived emotional experiences. Her work can be unflinching and disturbing as well as tender and intimate.

Tell us about the piece you’ll be presenting in the Lilian Baylis Studio.
The piece I’m presenting is set in an uncanny underworld of sorts inhabited by two mourning women. Centring around intimacy between women, this piece is ultimately an expression of grief for the ways in which this intimacy has been disturbed and inhibited. It is a world of haunting and healing. The piece draws from the performers’ and my own lived experiences of womanhood, as well as women in literature and film, including the character of Ida in Another Country by James Baldwin and Sethe in Beloved by Toni Morrison.

What was your first introduction to the world of dance?
My initial exposure to dance came through my family’s church community. The congregation was predominantly Zambian and dance was simply interwoven into every celebration, into the worship and into my play with other children. I also grew up during a trend of dance films and musicals in the early 2000s, whether that be Disney Channel musicals, or the Step Up films, I was hooked. I’ve always been quite introverted – I had a lot of physical energy as a child and loved becoming different people when I danced. My mum believed in giving us space as children to figure out what we were interested in, so it wasn’t until I was nine that I asked to join the dance after-school club at my primary school. From there, through music videos, Dance Moms and the Cunningham technique, I eventually discovered contemporary dance. And then, aged eleven, I very seriously vowed to dedicate myself to it.

Who are your biggest inspirations?
Some of my biggest inspirations would be Toni Morrisson, Donald Glover, Angela Davis, Michaela Coel, and Ocean Vuong. I respect their devotion to articulating the nuances and taboos within experiences many people share. Their work feels fearless to me, which I believe comes instead from their ability to recognise and hold fear, and then disempower it through the creation of their work. 

What do you think of choreography and dance in 2023?
I think I am new to the professional scene and am yet to fully understand what I am entering into. Culture seems to come in cycles, and I’m intrigued by the deaths and births of movement languages in dance at the moment. European and American Modern Dance is quickly fading, but I would love to see some strange rebirth of it all. I wonder when and if people will collectively pursue an urge to return to traditional dance, ritual dance or folk dance. 

I get a sense of collective confusion on what contemporary dance is right now, but I believe that is simply the unavoidable nature of a genre built on borrowing from other cultures and styles, whether that be ballet, butoh, kathak or breaking. I’m excited by the growing integration and interest in dance cultures created by marginalised communities. I only hope this shift truly represents and amplifies the communities who have been devoting their energy, care, and creativity towards these art forms for so long, rather than only developing those already in positions of privilege in the dance sector. I am particularly excited by the women I know choreographing around me, offering their own narratives of femininity in what still feels like a very patriarchal dance scene. I wish social media weren’t so integral. I wish we could do more community work and less commercial work. Overall, I love choreography and dance in 2023 and always, I would like to see and be part of more. 

What impact do you hope you will have on the UK dance scene?
A lot of impact comes from representation. I hope to encourage more people who feel underrepresented to be courageous in taking up space in the dance sector, as well as to recognise the discomfort they’ve lived in and be creative with it. I hope I can encourage more people of colour, more introverts, more religiously/spiritually confused folk to create from their own realities and fantasies and to stay true to themselves within environments not created for them. I’d like to contribute to a dance culture where we truly pay attention to how we make our collaborators and audiences feel and people have the courage to address what doesn’t sit right with them.

BLUE MAKWANA is a London based choreographer and performer whose work ranges from focusing on a specific stimulus to being abstract, with a passionate appreciation of movement, expression and tone. Often using the skull and hair as a focal point in her personal work, BLUE aims to blend strong contextual layers with an effervescent sense of fun and intrigue. 

Tell us about the piece you’ll be presenting in the Lilian Baylis Studio.
The work I’m creating and presenting in the Lilian Baylis Studio is going to be a display of toying with the term ‘BFF’, an acronym for ‘Best Friends Forever’. Through watching the portrayal of friendships on screen and through the observance and experience of real life ‘BFF’ friendships, I aim to briefly play with layers embedded within this term, presented through a medley of dances. Along with colourful lights and an eclectic music set, I hope to offer a fun, quirky and patchwork piece of dance.

What was your first introduction to the world of dance?
My mother was a professional dancer and I used to sit and watch her partake in open ballet and jazz classes at a very young age. Sitting at the back of the dance studio was always a thrill and I would come home and eagerly try to choreograph small dances with my sister, who is also now a thriving professional dancer and actress. Seeing my mother experience so much joy through dance is what inspired me to give this career a try. From there, with a lot of hard work and persistence, my career began to unfold, and I hope it will continue to do so.

Who are your biggest inspirations?
There are so many people who inspire me for different reasons. I am hugely inspired by activists who have fought so hard and who have dedicated their lives to making positive change for black people. Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela to name a few. I am thankful to them. I am inspired by their commitment, their bravery and their determination to make change. Without them, I am not sure that I would be in the position I am in now.

Erin Gruwell, an American teacher who worked tirelessly for her students, inspires me. I am inspired by her ability to see the positive in all her students. She believed in them, and I admire that she was able to see the light at the end of the tunnel for so many youths who were just trying to make it through the day.

I am inspired by the work of dance artists Parris Goebel, Debbie Allen and Misty Copeland, all of whom are leading such fruitful, abundant and exciting careers. Oprah Winfrey, a successful entrepreneur who has been able to navigate her industry with so much grace and courage, she too inspires me. Michael Jackson and Bob Marley are two inspirations for me who had unquestionable gifts and talent. Their work is electric. Their work is abundant, and their work is powerful.

Moreover, I am inspired when people have drive and an incredible work ethic. I am inspired by seeing what they create because of having this quality. Being successful; whatever that is; takes consistent hard work. It takes perseverance and it requires the ability to have vision, even in the hardest of times. It inspires me to see people’s hustle manifest into exciting and colourful dreams.

What do you think of choreography and dance in 2023?
I think the state of choreography and dance in 2023 is vast, saturated with an overwhelming abundance of work, eclectic, and overall, extremely exciting. There is something for everyone and this is something I appreciate.

What impact do you hope you will have on the UK dance scene?
Whilst working with styles, auras and music that I deem to be popular, I hope to splash something fresh into the scene. Especially the contemporary dance scene. I am not afraid to really have fun. Of course, it is great to overly contextualise work, but I also think it is exciting to see what happens when you make movement that simply feels good to do, that feels exhilarating to perform and something that has recognisable and familiar elements. Above making work, I hope to be a part of making some improvement with regards to the remuneration for dance artists. Dance artists work too hard to be paid a pittance for their sweat and efforts. That must change and if I am in the position to make a smidgen of a difference, I hope to do just that.

Roseann & Sula are choreographers based in London. Both originally from Scotland’s central belt, they come together to create work that lives in a leaded yet tender landscape. They are founding members of Tough Boys Dance Collective, and have presented work across black box theatres, night clubs, and site-specific spaces. Roseann Dendy is an artist from the outskirts of Glasgow. They are working in contemporary and hip hop to find a vocabulary that feels visceral and honest to their body. Sula Castle is a movement artist from Edinburgh. Working across contemporary dance and visual art, their work aims to obscure traditional form and platform bold aesthetics to challenge high-art expectations.

Pulling from phenomenological research, Roseann & Sula’s work is fundamentally about the human experience and its intersections with gender politics, Scottish identity, religion, and class.

Tell us about the piece you’ll be presenting in the Lilian Baylis Studio.
We are making a work about queerness, nostalgia and a type of poetic mourning. We are looking at our lived experiences as young queer people growing up in central Scotland, and beginning to gather a collection of abstract images that explore faith, loneliness and juvenile hunger.

What was your first introduction to the world of dance?
We were both super active throughout our childhoods, beginning to gravitate towards dance in our teen years. We ended up studying Contemporary Dance at Trinity Laban, where we began working together choreographically. We found that we were inspired by a lot of the same stuff, be it dance works, visual art installations or music. Growing up in Scotland, we were both introduced to the contemporary dance world through the Fringe and International Festival in Edinburgh. Here we saw some of the works that have come to form our artistic language, including Boy Blue’s Blak Whyte Gray, Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft, and Scottish Ballet’s restaging of Angelin Preljoçaj’s MC 14/22.

Who are your biggest inspirations?
We’re really inspired by films, we want our work to feel cinematic. Roseann is a massive horror fan, and we draw a lot from object and form symbolism in this genre. Our lived experiences as queer people also really feed our work. The research for our choreography is often autobiographical, using poetry, conversation and photo documentation to understand ourselves and where we sit within a wider queer history. We find ourselves to be quite aesthetically driven, finding moving images and staging to be super important. We actively take inspiration from high and low art spaces, from the Sadler’s Wells main stage to sending each other TikToks.

What do you think of choreography and dance in 2023?
We feel really lucky to be surrounded by a lot of cutting-edge work. It’s really exciting to see the lines between dance styles and artistic mediums starting to blend. More and more it feels like there is space to question where the boundaries of choreography lie, and what you can expect when you go to see dance.

What impact do you hope you will have on the UK dance scene?
We have been thinking a lot about sustainability within our practice. We choose to work collectively because we’ve found it allows us to make bolder choreographic swings whilst still maintaining an environment where creative compatibility and mutual respect are integral. We want to be part of the movement towards a dance world where the choreographer is not seen and treated like god in the space. Our Scottish identities also inform a lot of why we create. We care about making work that feels reflective of a Scottish lens that we don’t see so often in the dance scenes we move through. We want to platform art that decentralises the middle-class Southern English experience.

The Young Associates Mixed Bill will run at the Lilian Baylis Studio on the 22nd and 23rd of November, tickets can be bought at the box office or on sadlerswells.com.