Dundee's dance conquering the globe at 30

Darkin, Scottish Dance Theatre’s artistic director since 2012, has put jet-lag on the back-burner as she references events that ended a mere 36 hours earlier when she boarded the overnight flight to Amsterdam, on the many-staged transit home to Dundee. The company’s performances of her award-winning choreography, Miann, were part of the British Council’s Cultural Olympiad at the Rio Paralympics with two shows at the city’s Teatro Municipal Carlos Gomes, and a further two shows at Teatro SESC Consolacao in Sao Paolo.

“We got these massive standing ovations,” says Darkin. “An entire theatre of 600 seats on their feet, cheering and clapping in a way that you don’t really get elsewhere. And I think, perhaps, it’s to do with their own culture, a kind of spirituality that responds to the themes in Miann, which is, actually, inspired by Scotland. Do you know, we saw these really hard-core Brazilian punks in kilts, and shops called Scottish this and that. As I said, crazy magic!”

Truly crazy, truly magical when, after their second night performing in Rio, the dancers left the theatre only to get swept up in the street parties that seemed to be everywhere. “At 2 in the morning,” continues Darkin, “this big brass band –15 of them, all dressed up, wearing top hats – came round the corner. We’d all been exhausted, after the show, but everyone else was dancing in the streets. You can’t help it, you have to join in because people need dance and dance needs people. It’s primal, and it’s still a part of who we are.”

Those words are a cue to flash back, to 1986, when Royston Maldoom kickstarted what was then known as DRDC (Dundee Rep Dance Company). Maldoom had already set the folk of Fife dancing. He’d arrived there with two resonant beliefs: everyone – young or old, male or female – had dance inside of them, and there was an audience for dance that was self-determining and didn’t automatically take its cue from London trends. He was right on both counts, so much so that the Scottish Arts Council (precursor to Creative Scotland) came up with a grant of £24,000 so that Maldoom could deliver a programme of residencies and workshops across Tayside and beyond. This small touring unit would be based at Dundee Rep: a remarkably visionary choice - even now the theatre remains the only UK venue to have a resident in-house dance company as well as a core ensemble of actors.

Maldoom’s tactics saw a successful, symbiotic initiative evolve, one where community activity helped to grow an audience, and the performances by his professional dancers encouraged audiences to get involved themselves. Contemporary dance had gained a positive foothold in Scotland. His successor, Tamara McLorg built strongly on those foundations, her efforts recognised in 1991 by a Digital Award of £15,000, given specifically to support new choreography. It was the first such award to come to Scotland, and it placed DRDC firmly in the context of leading UK dance companies and artists. Times, and funding priorities, were however changing. Cultural strategies at national and local level had increasingly focused on values that used “bums on seats” rather than intrinsic artistic worth as a benchmark for financial support. When McLorg opted to follow new career paths,in 1995, Neville Campbell – former director of Leeds-based Phoenix Dance Company and founder of the Zimbabwean Tumbuka company – arrived, ready to take DRDC forward through the uncertain context of a fragmenting Scottish dance scene. Good intentions met awkward times, but when Campbell himself moved on in 1997 he had decisively changed the profile and perception of the company by re-naming it Scottish Dance Theatre.

Through thin, very thin and dispiritingly skinny times, the original purpose of DRDC/SDT had been carefully tended – like a beacon, shining a light on contemporary dance provision at both community and professional level – by everyone who had a hand in its programming. Even so, to many outsiders, taking on the artistic directorship of SDT was like walking into a dead end. Janet Smith saw it differently. Her fifteen year sojourn at SDT chalked up countless prestigious awards, saw tours extend beyond a limited Scottish circuit into a UK-wide, then global, itinerary where China and India added their stamps to the dancers’ much-travelled passports. A new custom-built studio (2004) took rehearsals out of a windowless basement, into an airy space where creativity could really breathe. Smith also added to the list of SDT’s "first to do..." landmark projects in 2007 when she commissioned a radical new piece of integrated choreography, Angels of Incidence, that brought four professional dancers who were also wheelchair users on-stage with the main company. The next year, Caroline Bowditch was still with SDT, employed as a Dance Agent for Change, and acting as a role model for artists and those in the community who had disabilities.

In 2012, Fleur Darkin picked up the SDT baton: since then she has poured unstinting energy into sustaining both its international touring success and its heartland connections with the community on its doorstep. She is currently leading the company a brilliantly merry dance that, in October, will see them at the Festival International Cervantino, Mexico with Velvet Petal, a new collaboration between SDT and Mexican contemporary music ensemble CEPROMUSIC.

“Sometimes, it does strike me as crazy,” says Darkin. “All these people – in Mexico, Brazil, all across Europe – know about Dundee because of dance, because of our company, blazing that trail. It just makes us want to do more, like setting up a youth company in Whitfield, that dances in its own terms. The first thirty years of SDT have been full of developments and transformation. That’s the challenge: take all that forward, take all the dance we need in our lives out to more and more people.” Not crazy, but magic..

Scottish Dance Theatre’s 30th Birthday Party is at Dundee Rep on Friday

www.scottishdancetheatre.com