SHE is a familiar face in the foyer. A slim 64-year-old woman with fantastically tuned dancer’s legs and a slightly shambolic air. She is friend, fan and mother figure all rolled into one, an essential ingredient in any first night audience. Val Bourne, for 25 years the driving force behind Dance Umbrella, is arguably the most important woman in British dance.
If your tastes run to Covent Garden and visiting Russian stars, chances are you may not have heard of Dance Umbrella. But for a quarter of a century this annual London festival has provided a showcase for independent contemporary dance that, in eschewing the tutus and tiaras of ballet, has helped to foster some of the most exciting developments in dance. Provocative, amazing, annoying, delightful, grungy, outré or just plain silly, Umbrella has done it all.
“I look for something that excites me; something special, something that makes me sit up in my seat,” says Bourne. For the past 25 years that has been her brief as artistic director.
She has celebrated indigenous artists, such as Michael Clark, Richard Alston, Laurie Booth, Russell Maliphant and Jonathan Burrows; she has brought over Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris, Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones and Stephen Petronio from America; Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker from Belgium, William Forsythe and his Ballett Frankfurt from Germany.
She has overseen 1,246 performances by 286 companies and artists from 21 countries in 32 separate venues. Bourne, a former ballet dancer turned arts administrator, has made Umbrella one of the largest and most important dance festivals in the world.
Back in 1978, while serving as dance officer for Greater London Arts, she organised the first Dance Umbrella, inspired by the one in New York. The London event was born as a rough outline put together by Bourne, Nick Hooten and Peter Gill. Jane Nicholas, dance officer of the Arts Council, put up the initial money.
“There was actually quite a lot of pressure to do something for emerging artists,” Bourne says. “There were people beginning to bang at the gates, people coming out of London Contemporary Dance School, people leaving Rambert and wanting to do their own work. But I discovered much later, only a few years ago, that actually the Arts Council’s idea had been to give us enough rope to hang ourselves. Let them do it, they thought, and let them see that it doesn't work and then we’ll be rid of them.”
Those ballet-lovers at the Arts Council obviously didn’t reckon on the popularity of contemporary dance, or on the tenacity of Bourne herself. Umbrella has seen its audiences grow from 120 a night to more than 2,000. “It wasn’t just me; I was just an agent,” says Bourne. “There was a caucus of people who were instrumental. Jan Murray at Time Out, for instance, was absolutely crucial at the beginning. Without her support, the first festivals wouldn't have survived.”
Bourne is not one to blow her own trumpet and this year she doesn’t have to. Everyone else is doing it for her. This is Umbrella’s silver jubilee and the party is going to be big. It starts on Sunday with a birthday gala at Sadler’s Wells, featuring Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris and Wayne McGregor in performance. It ends on November 8 with Umbrella’s biggest commission, the Merce Cunningham Company in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Praise and congratulations will no doubt be flowing.
What a far cry from that first festival, which kicked off with a good old-fashioned row. Bourne remembers it well. It was November 7, 1978, and the venue was Riverside Studios where Douglas Dunn was performing his Gestures in Red.
“At one point Douglas was doing a circuit of the stage on his back and this guy in the audience shouted out: ‘My intelligence has never been so insulted!’ And then another man shouted back that the first man was a fool if he couldn’t recognise good work. In the interval there was a similar fracas in the lobby where Jane Nicholas was saying: ‘This is not what we expected at all, and if this is what’s going to happen we’ll withdraw your grant instantly’. Peter Gill said ‘you stupid woman’, whereupon Bill Nicholas threatened to punch him. Afterwards Jane was still fuming and Bill was still threatening to take Peter outside. Then the reviews came out and they were good; nobody said anything any more about withdrawing the grant.”
There have been bad days and good days — 1994 was Umbrella’s annus horribilis when lack of money meant the festival almost didn’t happen — and performances good and bad. I remember watching Tim Miller barbecuing meat on the stage of the ICA and wondering what I was doing there. Bourne has her own bad memories, but is too gracious to name names: “Artists make mistakes and they should be allowed to. You have to stand by them no matter what.”
The highlights are easier to discuss. Stephan Koplowitz’s innovative Genesis Canyon, which took over the Natural History Museum in 1996; Siobhan Davies’s glorious White Man Sleeps in 1988; Mark Morris’s first London show in 1984 and then 13 years later his L’Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato at the Coliseum in association with ENO, a hugely ambitious venture for a festival that was used to thinking small.
In the early days, audiences were made up of students; today they are more middle-aged, although the Jerwood Proms are bringing the young back in. For £5, up to 500 prommers a night can stand to see Michael Clark, Trisha Brown and Saburo Teshigawara’s companies at Sadler’s Wells. Thanks to the proms, last year’s festival achieved its highest attendance.
Dance has changed almost beyond recognition in the decades Bourne has been presenting it. “Dance is richer than it was 25 years ago. It’s much more varied, much denser and more complex. There is a huge amount more work out there to choose from, so standards are higher.” Umbrella has reflected the shift, taking in more artists from Europe and farther afield; even the definition of dance itself is changing. “It’s such a broad church now. It seemed simpler in 1978.
“Then we were the cutting edge. We were pushing stuff which a lot of people hoped would go away. People saw Merce and Trisha as hugely threatening, but they have not gone away. They are still here, still making fantastic work.” And, thanks to Bourne, so is Dance Umbrella.
Festival information: 020-8741 5881
