nottdance: four curators in conversation - part 1

In the first part of a conversation with past and current curators of the nottdance festival, Andi Johnson, De Montfort PhD student and Organisational Archive Researcher, focuses on the festival's rich history and its significant role in shaping the dance landscape in Nottingham and beyond.

nottdance is a festival of extraordinary dance, presenting choreographic ideas and works from across the city of Nottingham and around the world, asking "What can dance be?"

The festival has always embraced experimentation, inviting radical perspectives and listening to artists working in ways that don’t fit the traditional, choreographic mould. 

In the 2025 edition, nottdance asks: How do we each perceive time? What does it feel like to belong? And whose stories are being told? Inhabiting the city’s theatres, galleries, shopping centres and outdoor spaces, the works reflect and celebrate our city and the world in which we live, with and for our communities near and far.

Visit nottdance Festival 

Andi Johnson (They/Them) is the Organisational Archive Researcher for Fabric. Alongside this, Andi is a PhD student at De Montfort University in Leicester.

Bill Gee (He/Him) works as a programmer, festival director, project producer, strategist, and researcher specialising in arts in the public space. He’s been doing something similar for the past 38 years since starting his professional life in the East Midlands at the end of the 1980s. Bill currently works with Activate; 101 Outdoor Arts; Bloomsbury Festival; Nature Calling; Jyll Bradley; R&D Studios, and as Access Support worker for Julian Rudd. 

Jane Greenfield (She/Her) has had an extensive arts career spanning over 30 years. Beginning in the mid-80s as Dance Animateur in Norfolk and Derbyshire, she went on to work at Nottingham Playhouse and Nottinghamshire Next Stage. In 1994 she became Director of Dance 4 and two years later, the Director of nottdance. 

From Dance4, Jane broadened her curatorial practice and worked across the live/performance and visual art sectors, including for Home Live Art and the National Trust's Trust New Art programme. Currently she works as Creative Producer for Culture Creative, an international arts & events company working in the realms of large-scale outdoor events and Winter light trails.

Nicky Napier (She/Her) has over thirty years of experience in the dance and performance sector and works in a freelance capacity as a curator, executive producer and dramaturg. She is currently interim Director at Independent Dance and was previously Head of Dance and Performance at the Southbank Centre, programming dance and performance across the entire site.  Nicky trained at Trinity Laban, has an MA Dramaturgy from Birkbeck and an MA Popular Culture from the Open University, and was Artistic Director at Dance4 and the nottdance Festival from 2004-2008. She is currently Chair of Ben Duke’s Lost Dog and will shortly become Co-Chair of Chishenhale Dance Space.

Paul Russ (He/Him) is Artistic Director and CEO of FABRIC, the dance development organisation based in the Midlands, UK. Paul was Chair of Nottingham 2023, the City’s European Capital of Culture bid and Chair of Nottingham Strategic Cultural Partnership. Paul has held many non-Executive roles in third sector organisations and has participated in international advisory panels and forums.

Visit nottdance Festival 

Visit Fabric Dance 

Music by Tom Harris listeningspace.xyz/

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com 

Fabric is an Arts Council England, National Portfolio Organisation. 

Transcript

Becky Bailey, Fabric: Hello. Welcome to Dance Moves People, a podcast from Fabric. It's a short series of chats between Fabric artists, friends and collaborators to celebrate the launch of our ten year strategy. This is the first of two episodes in conversation with Bill Gee, Jane Greenfield, Nicky Napier, and Paul Russ, the four people who have curated the nottdance Festival since the late eighties, when it first began. 

In this first episode, hosted by organisational archive researcher and De Montfort PhD student Andi Johnson, we hear them talk about how the festival came about and the landscape they each worked in.

Andi Johnson: Hi, my name is Andi Johnson, and I want to welcome you to the next episode of dance moves people. I'm a PhD student at De Montfort University, working along with Fabric and helping them create the archives. And today I am here with some of the past directors and curators of the Nottdance Festival,, as well as a current director and curator of the Nottdance Festival..

Bill Gee: Hi Andi, it's great to be here. I'm Bill Gee, I've come up from London, where I'm based now, but I work mainly in the outdoor arts world now, from London, but across the UK and sometimes internationally, but it's really wonderful to be back in Nottingham.

Nicky Napier: Hi, my name is Nicky Napier. I was in Nottingham between 2005 and 2008-9. I've been freelance for a number of years now. I work across dramaturgy, curating, producing, and I'm currently at Independent Dance. I'm the interim director looking at the creative and strategic operations of the organisation. So it's great to be here and great to be with colleagues.

Jane Greenfield: So hi, my name is Jane Greenfield. I was the director of Nottdance from 1996, we think. Bill handed over to me and I did that right through till 2005, which was my last festival. But Nikki had already started as director of Dance4 in 2004. So lots of transitions and handovers there. When I left Dance4, I went much more into kind of working within live art and performance and then gradually through that started to work as a freelancer around contemporary art and heritage, doing lots of curatorial work with the National Trust. And that kind of thing. And then eventually, and to what I'm doing now, is I work for Culture Creative, which is a large international events and production company focusing on working with light artists and kind of illuminated winter light festivals.

Paul Russ: Hello, I'm Paul Russ and I'm the current Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Fabric, which is an organisation that was born out of the coming together of Dance4 and DanceXchange and is now the organisation that produces and curates Nottdance. And I've had the absolute privilege of leading the festival since 2009. So for quite some years now. But also, it's an absolute delight that we're all in this space together today. Because what I will say is that Nottdance has very much shaped so much about who I am as a person. And that seems a little bit kind of maybe indulgent to say, but it was an important part of a very early stage of my life and it's wonderful that it can still be part of it now.

Jane Greenfield: What we should also say is, I think when I was the festival director and at Dance4, you were a student. It's true. At Nottingham Trent University.

Bill Gee: Yeah.

Jane Greenfield: And you remember me coming to give talks to the students.

Bill Gee:  And me. He was very young then.

Jane Greenfield: He was very, very.

Paul Russ: And there was also a moment... Like a sixth former? No, not quite that young maybe. There was also a moment where Simon Will was working Whether within Now Festival or Expo.

Jane Greenfield: Yeah, I mean you went across the Now Festival, Expo, the Nottdance Festival as the dance coordinator, what producer we would call nowadays.

Paul Russ: So I also remember him being in, you know, lecture theatres at Trent going, there's this festival called Nottdance, come along, you know, here's all the shows.

Bill Gee: And I'm sure we'll come back to Nottingham Trent and the importance of that because that is really important in the journey in the 90s anyway.

Andi Johnson: So yeah, today's conversation is really going to focus around the Nottdance Festival and its place within the city through the perspectives of each of the curators here today. So we're really excited to kind of dive into this history and foundational knowledge of how the festival has really built itself around the city and how the city has accepted or maybe at times not accepted as much the festival itself within its presence here. I'm going to help guide along the conversation with a few topical questions, but we're also going to kind of flow in between topics and happenings, things that arise through the conversation and have a bit of a free flow as well today. One of the aims of the Nottdance Festival has been to shape and define what dance can be within the current culture. From a curatorial perspective, how has the Nottdance Festival shaped a broader culture of dance?

Bill Gee: I'm going to actually take that even wider because I think we were working at such an interesting time at the start of the 90s in this country, which had obviously just thrown off Thatcher, but we were still in the time of John Major's, the end of the very long Conservative administration that went from 79 to 97. Nottingham and Nottinghamshire was a very interesting place and it's incredible now to think that both the city council and the county council were labour and socialist labour councils. And I think thinking of that and thinking of the politicians that in a way were behind behind some of the things that we were allowed to do is really part of it. You know, we are part, dance exists, win this world and politics and how the biggest society works happens and I think we were at a very particular moment in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire in the 90s where lots of social activity was really being funded and supported And in terms of the arts, so much arts activity was being funded in different ways, whether it was mainstream arts, the extraordinary arts in education programs that the County Council were supporting. And also, there was an incredible fund at the County Council called Nottingshire New Artworks, which put hundreds of thousands of pounds into creating new initiatives. and that was run by Liz Yeats and it had been initiated by then Councillor Alan Simpson who then became one of the MPs for Nottingham and I think that's an incredibly important thing because one of the projects that they supported was the paying for I think four years of a Nottinghamshire dance animator It was called Don McClure. And Don, in a way, is the person that created the Nottinghamshire Dance Festival. And that work, he was just sort of in that bringing together different aspects of the work that he was doing across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. And he created this festival and then There was this moment in 92 when he left quite suddenly at the start of the year and the festival was scheduled to happen with some events scheduled I think for April or May of that year of 92. And I was a sort of freelance producer at the time, incredibly young, and I sort of got the job to sort of pull it together. So I didn't really particularly programme but I sort of created this sense of doing the Nottingham Dance Festival in that year. And then I was asked to continue to do it in 93. And that's when I suppose I came up with this idea of Nottdance, because it was very much in the arts in Nottinghamshire. We were really pushing the boundaries, I think. It wasn't just with dance, but there was an incredible program called the Now Festival, which had come out of Contemporary Archives that had been initiated by David Maycarf and then Andrew Kalea Chetty took it on. And that brought extraordinary work to all sorts of spaces across Nottingham and the idea of things taking place obviously in the studio theatres, in the big theatres, in the galleries, but also in all sorts of other spaces was absolutely core to it. And you go back to those programmes and you just see, wow. the companies that came from all around the world was amazing. So I think there was a real culture of being able to experiment and do something different. And so I think the idea of Nottdance sort of being part of that in terms of some of the dance artists that were already had a relationship with Nottingham, some of those dance artists never appeared in the festival. But again, going back to Nottinghamshire New Artworks, I mean, they put tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds into MMM, which, you know, Michael Clarke's extraordinary piece. They put lots of money into the work that happened that Rosemary Butcher did at the Angel Row Gallery. You know, there's extraordinary work that wasn't within, but there were these artists that were coming to Nottingham and it was normal. But the other thing was that we were at this time when the person that ran Nottingham Playhouse was Ruth McKenzie. and many people know Ruth McKenzie and Ruth absolute powerhouse and absolute committed to the best of international work as well as British work coming to Nottingham and she powered away and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to bring some extraordinary work to Nottingham. So it was absolutely this culture in Nottingham at that time that then nottdance was fitting into that and offering something that was niche because it was in this sort of dance world, but yeah.

Jane Greenfield: And I think what you've described there as well, Bill, is, I mean, we were fortunate that dance was happening at that time at different scales. So you've just described, you know, the work that Ruth was doing at the Playhouse, you know, so that was kind of middle, well for Nottingham, large scale dance, but in truth, kind of middle scale dance, international work especially. So it was happening at that level. And then it was happening at the sort of, you know, the sort of smaller studio level, if you like, like the powerhouse, which was part of the small venue, the then small venue at Nottingham Trent University. So we had the good fortune of having dance happening at sort of small scale to relatively large scale. And I think it goes even further back than that because the Midland Group existed in Nottingham, which is kind of before my time, but I sort of remember it just about. I remember that it had Katie Duck performing there and Robert Ayres, who later went on to kind of be Professor Robert Ayres at Nottingham Trent University. You know, Robert was involved in that. So even going back into the earlier eighties, we had the Midland. It was the Midland group, wasn't it? So I think Bill's right. What he's described is this kind of almost perfect moment.

Bill Gee: And the other moment is obviously in the sister city in the East Midlands, which was what was going on in Leicester. And in Leicester, there was the reopening of Leicester Phoenix, which Nigel Hynes was the director of. And I must say that was the place when I was, you know, a student in Loughborough and living in Loughborough before I came to Nottingham, that was the place I would say I saw the first contemporary dance. I think it was, yeah, you know, I saw  The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs for the first time.

Paul Russ: I saw the Featherstonehaughs there as a teenager. So certainly a really important place for an introduction to where dance was kind of being discovered at that time.

Jane Greenfield: So you had natural partners and natural allies, I think, in that period of time that Bill's talking about. There was almost a perfect alignment of stars, really, because there was this kind of group of people either working within Nottingham Trent University or working, as you say, in the local authorities, Bill. And what was interesting about both the county and the city council then, apart from their extraordinary investment in arts and culture, I mean it was so extraordinary that they were seen by other local authorities around the country as the pioneers when it came to investing in arts and culture. Other local authorities looked up to Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. And Bill's right, it was quite extraordinary, the kind of investment that they made, either through schools work, there was a dedicated building, College Street, which was dedicated to creating arts opportunities for young people, and that lasted for a number of years. So it was happening at every level, really. within that group of people that were either running festivals or programming work, what was great, and I don't know whether that's the same now, it would be interesting to get that sense from Paul, you didn't kind of have to convince people of what you were doing, because you could go to the county council, you could go to Tim Harris and Tim Challens at the time at the county council, You could go to Andrew Chetty, who is a regular collaborator, and you could say, we want to do this. Or they would come to you and say, we want to do this. And 20,000 grand would be put on the table. 5,000 grand would be put on the table. Andrew Chetty would go, well, we'll take that. And we'll go, well, we'll commission that. And it always has its challenges. Every period of time has its challenges. But it wasn't difficult, I'm sure, compared to the difficulty now in terms of the resources and funding that's available. There was money. There was a fundamental difference. There was money. There was money to do international work. There was money to do touring. There was money for R&D, unapologetically R&D. There was money for young artists. There was money for beginners. It wasn't difficult to get. And then through the beginnings of the lottery funding as well, We were talking earlier about this scheme that was called A for E, which I forget what it actually stood for.

Bill Gee: Arts for Everyone.

Jane Greenfield: Arts for Everyone. But through Arts for Everyone, you could apply for huge amounts of money, huge then, in the kind of early mid-90s? Mid-90s? Mid-90s. I remember down before we applied for international R&D and international residency work. And we got something like £170,000 over three years. And Reckless Sleepers, who we should mention as part of that kind of constellation of organisations, they got a huge wadge of money.

Bill Gee: Bill, you were saying that you applied for... On behalf of Nottinghamshire New Artworks for half a million, we got half a million.

Jane Greenfield: And I remember between half a dozen organisations, we were sitting on a large amount of money, which we were able to put directly into artist work, new work, commissions. So we were very fortunate, I think, looking back on it. And I know that's not the same now, necessarily.

Nicky Napier: And just adding in that during my time in the early 2000s and into the later 2000s, money was becoming more scarce during those times, but I think some of the partnerships that had been, that you've spoken about already, just wanted to mention Stella Couloutbanis, who was at Bonnington and Powerhouse. People like Stella were incredibly supportive. not only in terms of providing the other spaces that were really right for some of this experimental work that was coming in, but would always find the odd thousand pounds in the back pocket, which was always really helpful. And just thinking more broadly outside of the locality, The national and international networks were something that I was really beginning to rely on. We had fantastic partnerships. We talked before, Jane, about what was happening at the Arnolfini in Bristol, what was happening up in Lancaster at the University with Matt Fenton. and what was happening in Birmingham with the Fierce Festival. Mark Ball was at the Fierce Festival. Mark and I went to Brazil together and we were looking at work together there. I mean, we could go on, but there was what was happening in London and then there was the wonderful things that were happening in the other places around what was happening in Manchester. And then the international partnerships. We had partnerships with the French Institute, for example, and I think there was a moment where trusts and foundations maybe were a little easier around those times. The Esme Fairbairn Foundation gave us money for, we were thinking about how do we work more closely with local artists and Nottingham Trent was incredible in terms of visual artists, live artists. Those artists coming out was really what was part of the wonderful foundation that made everything continue to be possible in terms of the the art that was being made. But I think the dance community maybe was more fragmented, maybe less supported. And getting money from the Esme Fairbairn Foundation was incredible to look at what did the dance artists in this area and in Leicester and in Derby. And then there was what was the change over in Derby from the, became Deda, what was happening there with Steve Munn. So there was I think a lot of things that happen are about the networks that you create, the conversations, the working together, not only in terms of making the structures possible to make things happen, but finding the money, finding the conversations. So we were lucky, I think.

Jane Greenfield: I always look back on it as a bit of a kind of like golden age, and I'm curious to know from Paul, because you know, Paul represents what's happening now, and obviously the funding landscape has changed, the networks have changed, and priorities have changed. And Nottdance is still here, which is great, but I'm sure it's much more complex and challenging to maybe do the things that you want to do or how you do them, how you go about doing them and how you frame that work.

Paul Russ: I mean, it's really fascinating to hear so clearly that history, some of it feels really familiar from being a student in Nottingham, but also having worked outside of these Midlands and having worked in London and the East region for a while before coming back to Nottingham. And certainly, so if I think about coming back to Nottingham and what I felt like I was welcomed with was this incredible organisation, group of individuals, real commitment and care to hold space for kind of radical ideas, radical spaces, the ability for artists and a structure like Dance4 to in effect resist conforming to what I was really hearing, maybe more in the dance sector than maybe in the life of Nottingham or maybe in the life of the broader art sector, was really a kind of moment where I felt that whilst a Labour government was talking about, well, maybe in the early part of the 2000s, it was a real growth moment, wasn't there, for Olympic investment? But for dance, it arrived in buildings and it arrived in developing physical infrastructure across the country, which is brilliant and important for the art form, of course. But in a way, what I felt like I was arriving with was this beautiful thing that was dance for and nottdance, but also this massive pressure to effectively at that time say, well, what's what's for dance? What's going to happen for dance in Nottingham? Because that thing that is there doesn't quite sit with the national discourse that is these big, impressive new spaces for dance that are continuing to create space for Yeah, and I don't want to dismiss the kind of important works that they were doing, but it was aesthetically not dealing with the kind of range of works or discourses that was present in a festival like Nottdance or in an organisation like Dance For. So that was a complex beginning and also a moment where funders were saying there is no more money for the festival. And what I was at that moment hearing is we don't value it. And so I remember a really important conversation that I had with Nikki in a kind of handover moment that was really emotional. And what that made me do is go, well, Nottdance is vital because nothing can happen with this, the growth of this organization if Nottdance disappears. So to those people that don't necessarily want to see Nottdance continue, Well, I could swear, because that's not going to happen. So not on my watch anyway. But we might have to do it differently. And we might have to find a future for the festival that continues to hold all of those really important relationships, opportunities, practices. but also try and open up something which reveals that a city like Nottingham should have more for the art form for both artists and audiences to meet in these extraordinary ways. And we were still one of those cities that hadn't been given space properly or the right levels of investment. And so there was lots of things to fight for in this moment.

Jane Greenfield: It's interesting because you say that because, I mean, although I describe this like, you know, golden age, which I think it was, for the reasons that we've said, I do still remember with the Arts Council and with our dance officers, there being a tension there about the kind of work we were supporting and promoting or bringing over or touring and because it lent very much into kind of live art and performance art, it was experimental. dance, and always being interested and frustrated equally that the officers within the theatre department then, or those officers responsible for live art, which they were then, understood what we were doing and supported what we were doing and were absolutely like, yes, more of this, whereas the dance officers almost kind of understood it, but I'm going to say didn't understand it. And in a way, he sort of said, you know, you need to be looking at what Dance Umbrella were doing down in London. It's like, well, they're doing Mark Morris. Why would we do that? I mean, you know, Ruth Mackenzie could have done that at the Playhouse, but why would the Nottdance Festival be doing stuff like that? So at times it felt like we were in the wrong department because you had departments then, art form departments. We were in the wrong department then. We should be more aligned with live art or with theatre. So there were those tensions there as well and it felt frustrating that you were every year having to kind of make that argument. I think what I was finding was finding other allies.

Nicky Napier: Yeah. And you were talking there about the sort of buildings, the capital, the sort of era of the big capital campaigns. And you mentioned Dance Umbrella there, Jane. I'm thinking that What made Nottingham special, I think, for me, was the sense that there was a rougher possibility with the spaces that were more found spaces. You could do things in empty shops, you could do things at Bonnington. We had this amazing theatre called Sandfield Theatre, which I think was looked after by the council, where we were self-producing there.

Jane Greenfield: It's a 200-seater, fully-equipped theatre, which I think has now been raised to the ground, has it not?

Paul Russ: housing estate.

Nicky Napier: But it meant that, you know, we'd go to the Playhouse and they'd say, no, you need, we need, we need sort of 350 people to break even on this, where we could take something into Sandfield and we would take a risk on it. And that, that was very different from what was happening in London. And it was more akin to what was happening internationally. So I was certainly looking at what was happening in Belgium and, you know, countries like that, where they were using smaller spaces or found spaces. and the importance of that in terms of providing a framework for presenting this radical work. And one of the challenges, certainly during my time, was to think about how do we really make sure that the audience for that work continues. So it was thinking about how do we talk differently about what is risk-taking experimental work, not only to our colleagues in the dance sector, as you said, to the Arts Council, which remained remained an issue, but to the audiences, how do we translate that? So we had a ready-made audience here in terms of the students, the Nottingham Trent students and those people that carried on living here and making work, but how do we continue to sort of embed that into the audiences here?

Andi Johnson: I think one of the things that we've recognized in some ways, but not actually formed from the beginning, is Dance4's relationship to the Nottdance Festival, as the Nottdance Festival itself existed before Dance4. It was ongoing. And then when Dance4 moved up from Leicester to Nottingham, kind of took over collaborating and really holding that festival as a part of its programming over the years, which in part the festival itself may have helped Dance4 grow into what it was becoming and has become today as Fabric. And so I just wanted to take a moment to recognize that Nottdance as a festival actually existed way before these kind of dance agencies came into play and started working on developing dance. And it was kind of doing something and Dance4 kind of picked up the something that it was doing.

Bill Gee: I wouldn't say it was way before. I think it was within that time. And there's a very practical thing there that, you know, I was a freelancer and I'd been nearly all of my life. And when Dance 4 moved from Leicester to Nottingham, they took on offices on Regent Street, just up from Nottingham Playhouse. And basically I was your tenant, wasn't I? I had a desk and also the back room, I think, had a desk because they had the money as a charity and all of that to take on the lease for five years on offices and to run them well. So we had a very close dialogue. When I was doing, say, I can't remember whether that would have been 94 or 95, but when I was doing the 95 Festival, it was still separate from Dance4, but you know, we were very... We were sitting across the room. We were literally sitting across the room. You know, there is a very, these aren't huge organisations, these were sorts of people that were, and we would often be, you know, at things together, whether it was, you know, wherever it was as well. But I think there was, sorry, going back further in, I think there is that whole thing about the National Dance Agencies and the fact that the National Dance Agencies came through the Devlin Review in the late 80s and then that sort of got super powered. for the East Midlands because, you know, Dancehall did the Year of Dance in 93. So that is sort of part of their history as well. And they were, you know, I remember then there was this thing, you know, they were well funded and they were more funded than nottdance. So I remember there was this thing about Well, it was sort of probably going to be inevitable that they would take it over when they made that move. And that was, you know, that was fine, I think. It felt a right fit.

Nicky Napier: Certainly during my time, Dance4 felt so important in terms of its relationship to the festival. And Dance4 was the national dance agency, but the importance of what was then called the regional agencies in Derby and Leicester and Northampton, that was really important in terms of the sort of web of people that were supporting dance practitioners. And one of the, Jane, one of the wonderful things that I inherited was something that you did, which was called Line of Inquiry. And that felt really important to me because that spoke to the relationship between Dance For and Nottdance, which you had wonderfully held and that, you know, I tried to continue, which was providing an opportunity through the year-round program of Dance For to support artists to experiment and to make work or to have conversations with people internationally. So maybe you could talk a bit about Line of Inquiry because I had the last year of that, which was the pairing, wasn't it, of artists?

Jane Greenfield: Yeah, I mean it was R&D based. I seem to remember, I'm having to kind of go back in time now. But it, yeah, lent very much into that desire to kind of support artists through inquiry, through R&D. I think we had a mix of international artists and UK-based artists, and kind of left people to their own devices very much. It's like, there's the studio, off you go. I do remember spending quite a lot of time, though, in the studio with those artists, watching those artists. And that, interestingly, is something you said this morning before we started, Nicky, maybe being able to have the time and space then to sort of almost have a dramaturgical role, a kind of outside eye role, which I'm not sure people have much time to do now, but it was fairly fundamental. You were asked to go into the studio, you were asked to watch work, you were asked to sit there for the morning and give feedback. And we didn't describe it as dramaturgy in those days.

Nicky Napier: No, no, it was part of the job. It was sort of an important part of the job. I remember that one of the artists, I think, I don't know if it was during your time or my time, there was a group of artists called Hancock and Kelly that were based here in Nottingham. And we paired them with, I believe, an Australian dance artist called Martin Delamo. And that was a really great opportunity for, they were live artists, Martin and Hancock and Kelly. but the relationship between Martin's work and the possibility that they could then travel to Australia. And I think that came into another program that came out as something we did with Critical Path in Sydney. So then the webs of connections between the things that you did, Jane, and how they fed into this desire to provide space for artists to actually take time with their work, which I think, you know, you talked about the sort of heyday of the 90s where people were able to have more money, but I think I felt in the dance sector that the valuing time and experimentation and taking a journey with artists was less something that happened in the dance sector in this country, but it was happening much more in France, etc. So you were seeing different work there that certainly I thought Nottdance was looking to in terms of being more interesting.

Paul Russ: Yeah, and I think one of the things that's been really important in realising nottdance and continuing that relationship between the work of a structure like Dancefor, what's been really important is to make the festival possible. it's meant that we've, in a way, had to really lean into all of those research moments and really commit to those moments to enable the ideas, the practices that emerge from those to then also meet an audience through, say, Nottdance. And so actually one of the ways of bringing Nottdance about over the last few years has been only being made possible by the commitments made to a research process. And that continues to be a really joyous way of making sure those two things are absolutely understood and continue to be a vital part of what we're doing.

Nicky Napier: And I also remember that Nottdance, you know, I think possibly during all of our times was often presenting work that was not being shown in London. Absolutely. And that used to give me great, great joy, but also great frustration. Yeah. And I think, you know, Jerome Bell was potentially a programme that Sadler's, but he was definitely

Jane Greenfield: He was programmed in Nottingham first. He was definitely programmed here first. I know, he was programmed in Manchester first by Bush, actually, to Bush's credit. And then about six months later, he started coming to Nottingham. And that's, you know, that's the journey then, the relationship with that company that went on for several years, but certainly didn't happen because of London. It happened outside of London.

Nicky Napier: And that was not only important just in terms of those artists being presented here, but also the dance and the, what we now talk of as interdisciplinary artists, seeing work from international artists and having, being able to network with them and be with them within a festival context felt very important.

Paul Russ: Yeah, but also really respectful to just going right back to the beginning when thinking about what enabled Nottdance to come about and to be what it is today and in a way was because many different elements were there and collaborating. So, yeah, it continues to be a place where extraordinary practices, you know, these kind of experimental practices are possible because the very foundation was placed right at the beginning.

Jane Greenfield: I think also the flip side of that slightly, although it wasn't a problem, it was a nice problem in a way, was that because Dance4 through Nottdance was kind of a bit of a beacon, well it wasn't a bit of a beacon, it was a beacon for artists working experimentally or in an interdisciplinary way, it put those artists and venues and programmers, especially in mainland Europe, looked to nottdance and looked to Dance4 for being the place where they could, you know, that artist could go perform. And so there was quite a bit of pressure, I think, on Dance4 and the festival to kind of, not to take the work, but to sort of try to respond to literally to all the requests from artists and companies abroad who were not going to London, trying to go to London. They were trying to come to Nottingham. I mean, you know, that was a great thing. I mean, you kind of had a bit of, you know, had the chip on my shoulder because of that. But it was great because for once London wasn't taking the glory, which often used to do. And I also remember reviewers talking about, oh, Jerome Bel is going to be seen in London for the first time at the ICA. And I used to think, you know, I should ring them up and go, you need to get your facts right. Jerome started coming to Nottingham too, you know, but that was the sort of, for some people it was, it's still very much London, you know, London was associated with, I'm waffling now, but London was the place where those artists were associated. And actually that wasn't the truth. But it did mean that there was a kind of pressure on you to try to kind of find a place for this work.

Nicky Napier: I'm thinking about there was sometimes moments of isolation in terms of Dance4 and the National Dance Agency Network because in a way Dance4 was seen as the sort of naughty kid. Yeah, it was quite a challenge at times, but then it was about being really sure that the work that we were bringing and how it was sitting in relation to UK work or local work and really thinking about how to layer that within the festival became more important. So I could speak more confidently about why it was important. But then I'm just thinking about what was changing in London in the 2000s. So Emma Gladstone, the wonderful Emma Gladstone, was then at Sadler's Wells where we're programming the Lillian Bay Theatre. And that, the sort of dialogue between Emma and myself and others, you know, we were thinking about what was happening at the tramway in Glasgow. So I think I think it was 2008, Nottdance, we took a moment to take some work to London, just to kind of show, it was almost, we weren't thinking about let's take the work to London, we were thinking about how do we signal back that you see work happens in Nottingham. So yeah, it was trying to sort of say to people, come on, keep looking at Nottingham. But as you said, there was a sort of balance of international artists and promoters knew that Nottingham was the place to bring work and Glasgow and Manchester, etc. But it was interesting how it was changing in London. It was beginning to change through wonderful people like Emma.

Andi Johnson: So it really sounds like nottdance itself was the place where this kind of like alternative art and alternative live art performance and dance was able to really be nourished and grow from very early stages. And then it really started shifting the landscape of what was seen as important or urgent to program within other locales in the UK as well.

Nicky Napier: Can I add in what, sorry Bill, one organisation that I think deserves a really strong name check is Arts Admin as well. They were really significant at that time in terms of artists like Bobby Baker, Graham Miller, I think Rosemary Lee was based out of there. Bock and Vincenzi. Bock and Vincenzi, and those artists also.

Bill Gee: Maria La Ribot.

Nicky Napier: Exactly.

Bill Gee: I was just going to say, I mean, yes, I think absolutely. But I think that, you know, there are other organisations and, you know, the work. Well, it was when she was within the Arnolfini that Helen Cole was doing at the Arnolfini that she then took into in between time. Of course, it's live artwork, but actually, again, much of that would be nottdance work as well. So I think there are.

Jane Greenfield: But I think that's what I mean. Those, even back in the 90s and then onwards, that people like Helen and the Tramway in Glasgow, with Steve Slater, who was my sort of professional collaborator then, they were our allies, not the dance venues, not the other dance festivals generally. we were much happier and it was much easier to partner with live art venues, whether you were touring La Rebord or whether you were touring Jerome Bell or whatever, it was within the live art sector where we felt more at home and got more response and support really.

Paul Russ: You said earlier that Dance4 and the Festival were a beacon and I think that's really important to to be proud about because certainly what was important about all of those relationships is that it gave those working in dance that could see the kind of restrictive nature in which some dance programs are arrived at, gave us hope in a way that that people could cite really extraordinary radical ideas in dance. Like it is possible those things are coming from a dance artist or from discourses that come out of dance and can be in dance and should be embraced by dance. So it was an absolute beacon for that because without, particularly without a programme of nottdance, what would we have had for so often? We'd have had dance in all of its wonderful codes, but not necessarily in these kind of special, slightly icky places of like, yeah, like the undefined space often that the festivals are able to open up for everyone.

Bill Gee: I know we're all older people. Obviously, Paul, you're less old than some of us. He's the youngest snapper. I'm also thinking, you know, and I have a very strong long-term mentoring relationship with a person that's no longer young because they're in their 30s. E.L.J., Emma Lewis-Jones, who grew up through all of this, you know, and her practice and then her decision to go to Falmouth and then her practice since then in terms of coming back to Nottingham and then moving to Glasgow and now you know, she's very much being seen as one of the leading sort of dance dramaturgs and creating a new way of being a dance dramaturg. And I don't think she would have got there without that context. And I wonder if there are other people, you know, who are now they've emerged as artists working in dance. They may not be here in Nottingham, but you could say there's an absolute relationship with the form and the approach as well as the individual artists that Nottdance adopted or presented that has ultimately really influenced their practice.

Paul Russ: I think there are many artists as well as cultural workers, we call them producers, presenters, curators, dramaturgs that have had a really deep relationship with the festival and the organisation. I think of Eva Martinez, I think of Claire Hicks, I think of Isla. Yeah, you know, there's so many who are now in other cities and other contexts that are carrying the kind of slightly disruptive nature of what Nottdance did and what Dance 4 did and what I hope Fabric continues to do. So I can see that in every way, that it's been really important in shaping what other audiences and contexts now have in their space, because those people have grown and discovered what's possible through this organisation and its work.

Becky Bailey, Fabric: Thanks for listening to this episode. For more on Nottdance, the conversations our directors made and make when programming and what Nottingham means to the festival, check out episode two available wherever you get your podcasts.