© Clare Park Sapsford dancing reviews www.futurephysical.org Random Dance Company

At just 27, Tom Sapsford looks to have it all in the bag. Making the break from the Royal Ballet earlier this year, he has spent his first six months ‘outside’ dancing with hotly-tipped and prosthetically-enhanced Random Dance Company; making work for the Clore Studio; collaborating with acclaimed singer/songwriter Errollyn Wallen and ultra cool filmmaking duo The Honey Brothers in the multi-media Jordan Town and dabbling in digital technology with a research commission from the ICA/virtual incarnations.

It all sounds eminently hip. But anyone who assumed Sapsford to be some insouciant prodigy freewheeling on the new media bandwagon would be quite wrong. For all the quirky, quick-talking hyperactivity there is a thoughtful and at times self-castigating side to him that is gradually negotiating his artistic identity. Having grown up within the fold of the Royal Ballet since the age of 11, this hasn’t always been easy.

Take his attitude to his earlier works: “Every one of those pieces is an aberration; I couldn’t bear to watch any of them again” he proffers dramatically when I innocently ask if the clubbing theme in his earlier works anticipates the youth market he is addressing in Jordan Town. (He once told Debra Craine that youth culture was his subject matter. “I was young then,” he said, flinching at the reminder.) Speaking of the pieces he made for the Royal Ballet’s Dance Bites tours between 1996-98 he says, “I think at that age I felt the pressure to make a certain kind of work, because of the audience I knew would come to see it”. Perhaps he felt compelled to produce something that was the in-your-face antithesis of the “pretty tutu ballet” that, he says, audiences expected in order to justify his departure from the form. Perhaps the shadow cast by the mavericks before him was an added pressure. In any case, “All Nighter”, he says laughingly “was a nightclubbing piece but somehow it turned out to be like a 1920’s ballet about a nightclub”.

His great lesson from that time, he says, is not to concern himself with what other people expect from him and to only make work that comes from “answering my own questions”. “I could make a tutu ballet, but I don’t think even I would want to watch it” – not so much a gesture of self-abasement as an admission that the “questions” that drive him are not aesthetic but substantive: “There’s something that interests me about being human, about humanity. What I like about Wayne’s (McGregor) work are those deep questions: You know, if you have a pacemaker, or if part of you is electronic, are you human or are you a cyborg?”.

Tom with Cathy Marston posing for the first
Cohabitants show in the Clore (February 2001)
Photograph by Clare Park

We’ll have to wait for Sapsford to answer that one. For now he’s wallowing in the creative juices of his collaboration with Wallen and the Honey Bros. Jordan Town is a work derived from the artists’ independent intuitive responses to Wallen’s songs that have a unifying theme of a journey. He won’t specify what that journey is. But the serendipity of the three elements – film, dance and song – coalescing into a mutually- enhancing work makes it “very mesmeric” to watch and wonderfully exciting to be involved in. Not least because it cements an association with Wallen that goes back to the age of 17 when they met on a course for choreographers and composers. And for its nostalgia factor. He and long-term friend and fellow, Cathy Marston, “in our wild student days” as guests at Wallen’s cabaret spontaneously took to the stage in an accolade to one of the same songs featured in the current production.

Such unqualified endorsement of his work is in contrast to the often self-ironic tone with which he recounts his past. It may seem hard to imagine. Sweeping all the choreographic prizes off the shelf in his teens at the Royal Ballet Lower School (White Lodge) and making his professional debut dancing naked onstage with Michael Clark – the freeze frames of Sapsford’s life could again make one think this is a man for whom life has been a breeze. He seems to have wowed the establishment and the iconoclasts with equal ease.

Certainly, Sapsford’s beginnings seem precocious. His calling for dance apparently manifested itself at the fragile age of two-and-a-half with an ambition to follow his childminder’s older daughter to ballet class. Top of the Pops in the 80s prompted his first choreographic impulses, witnessed only, though, by the four walls of his living room. Then, liberally minded parents and an excellent, council-run dance and drama school in Leicester, Knighton Fields, saw his youthful creativity flower unhampered. It continued to do so once he entered White Lodge at 11, where he became the choreographic legend before, he says, fully understanding what the word meant.

But the young Sapsford was not altogether happy. It was not because of the dominance of the classical form. Patricia Linton, at the lower school, and David Drew and Norman Morrice later on gave him every permission and encouragement to experiment with styles. (He particularly salutes the latter two’s role as mentors in his development.) . It was rather a feeling that his life was so focussed at such a young age that he “couldn’t imagine there was anything on either side” of the Richmond Park estate. And above all, for all that he cherished his choreographic accolades, they seemed, one another level, to be his “ticket”, as he puts it, to a world that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise accept him.

Landing his first performing job with Michael Clark while still a student at the RBS was a huge thrill. Not just because Clark was the rebel-hero, who had left the Royal Ballet and was working with art house filmmaker Peter Greenaway. “I was so surprised”, he says, “because I had never even considered that anyone would give me a dancing job. I didn't quite know what was going to happen at the end of my training. I kept being told you're the one that is going to be the choreographer, which although was nice and encouraging I still wanted to be a dancer as well….”. And why in the world would he not be a dancer? “Because I was always told that I would never ever be a classical dancer. Because my feet don’t point as much as they should…and my legs don't turnout enough…and I'm small…” (Like most ballet dancers his capacity for censorship of his own body is well developed.)

The Royal Ballet of course, subsequently took him - notwithstanding his fatalistic act of self-sabotage when he was convinced of rejection: “There came the test class, you know, you got marked on your on your entrechat sixes, and I went out got very drunk the night before, didn't bother about it, didn't know the exercises and then four hours later I was called into the office, you been offered a job with the Royal Ballet”.

Thus began life as, in his words, “jobbing corps de ballet” where Sapsford became known as a trouper; always onstage, always on hand to replace another injured dancer. With the help of Drew’s support, small opportunities to choreograph were snapped up and turned into successes. There was a piece for RB dancers to raise money for elephants in Kenya in 1994 and later, creations for Irek Mukhamedov and Tetsuya Kumakawa as well as the string of Dance Bites works that he now disowns. His real break came, however, 1995 with receipt of the first ever Jerwood Choreographic Award. It gave him the, since unparalleled, luxury of his own company of dancers, no commercial pressure to produce work but a venue on hand if he was ready. The result was Where Her Voice, which would be programmed in that year’s Dance Umbrella and whose success put him on the map of the wider dance community.

That profile was raised by his recent work at the Clore Studio, Last Night at the Empire in 2001 and tic(k) this year. These commissions marked the beginnings of independence from the Royal Ballet, since, as Sapsford is keen to point out, the Artists’ Development Initiative of which they formed part comes under the mantle of the Royal Opera House, quite separate from the directorship of the RB.

Sapsford’s recent departure from the Royal Ballet seems to have been as sober and un-petulant as his time there. He has nothing but recognition and gratitude for the “regular secure income, great amount of performing experience, and the opportunity to get to know backwards some incredible pieces of choreography” that his time there afforded. The decision to leave was partly logistical. With his choreographic commissions increasing and performing obligations not diminishing he found himself working seven days per week for months on end. The risk of freelancing - of moving from “having two jobs at once to having possibly no work at all” – had to be taken. But it also came from the satisfaction of having, at last, fulfilled a dream in terms of performing some great roles on the Covent Garden stage: Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Alain in La Fille Mal Gardée and Shy Boy in The Concert – a satisfaction tinged, however, with the realisation that he actually prefers dancing the more contemporary repertoire of Clark and, now, McGregor.

Sapsford has taken to the cyber dancing of fellow choreographer, McGregor, with gusto. His prosthetic limb in Nemesis comes as naturally to him as wielding an épée for the countless fencing bouts of his Romeo and Juliet career. He loves the challenge of McGregor’s style, which he describes as “dense and complicated, fast and furious and very demanding in performance” but he won’t be held to account for where he stands himself on the classical/contemporary divide.

“I find it very difficult to see barriers. When people say ‘Do you make ballets or do you make contemporary dance?’ I don't see any difference, it's just movement. There is as much diversity between different forms of contemporary dance is there is between contemporary dance and ballet.” His latest work for the Clore, Tic(k), juxtaposes a witty, angular and abrupt style to a soundscape of cuckoo clocks and acapella with a middle section to Schubert which I referred to as more “balletic”. But, he says, much of what audiences interpret as either classical or contemporary depends more on the musical associations they make and by the training of the dancers than in a quality inherent in the movement.

He is equally inspired by ballet dancers – Alina Cojocaru and Zenaida Yanowsky in particular, as well as long-term collaborator, Jenny Tattersall – as by the “amazing” dancers at Random among which he feels honoured to be counted. His favourite choreographer, interestingly enough, is Nijinska. Another one to resist pidegeonholing, she is a revered establishment figure and yet her Les Noces and Les Biches are, as he puts it, still subversive to watch and perform in today.

Where will the mercurial Sapsford go next is the big question. For now, if you can’t catch his current tour of Jordan Town you can find a virtual version of him soon on a website near you (check out www.futurephysical.org). For the future, he says “I’d like the chance to keep developing the voice I’m finding…and to be able to try working on different scales, and in different genres.”

“It would be easy to say ‘OK, this is what I do and I’m stopping here’ but I wouldn’t like to get to the stage where my style was very definable. I think that would be limiting. I’ve just got to keep answering the questions that interest me”.