A Lyrical Meditation on Memory, Loss, and the Mythology of the Self
Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth & Phantom. Photo Credit: Natasha Back
text by Lara Monro
This April, choreographer and director Holly Blakey returns to London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall with the UK premiere of A Wound With Teeth and Phantom—a poetic double bill that moves through the fragile space between remembering and forgetting, intimacy and distance, body and absence. Following their world premiere in Paris, these works arrive charged with raw intensity and emotional precision, further cementing Blakey’s status as one of the most vital voices in contemporary movement.
Blakey’s work resists easy categorization—existing in the liminal space between film and stage, commercial and avant-garde, sensual and sacred. Known for her signature blend of tactile immediacy and cinematic movement, she has choreographed for Florence and the Machine, Rosalía, and Harry Styles while creating radical live performance works at institutions like the Southbank Centre. Her choreography is a language of desire, distortion, and dissolution.
A recipient of a UK MVA Award for Best Choreography (Florence and the Machine’s Delilah) and a nominee for Best New Director, Blakey has collaborated with Gucci, Burberry, and Dior while cultivating a singular performance vocabulary. Her return to Queen Elizabeth Hall follows the five-year evolution of Cowpuncher and its sequels—culminating in a sold-out Royal Festival Hall performance with the London Contemporary Orchestra.
A Wound With Teeth
How do we reconstruct ourselves in the absence of memory? In A Wound With Teeth, Blakey unflinchingly explores forgetting—not as loss, but as a space for reinvention. Dancers navigate a world on the brink of collapse, summoning monsters, myths, and fragmented selves in place of what has been erased. Inspired by Blakey’s own experience with memory loss, the piece unfolds like a fever dream—part elegy, part invocation—hovering between the rational and the uncanny.
Phantom
If A Wound With Teeth is an act of forgetting, Phantom is a ritual of remembrance. Ten dancers move with aching precision through a liminal space of grief and endurance, their bodies caught in a choreography that feels like sacred rite. Set to an atmospheric score by Gwilym Gold and costumed by Chopova Lowena, Phantom transforms the pain of Blakey’s personal experience with miscarriage into a visceral, collective reckoning. It is not about healing, but confrontation—a raw engagement with the weight of what we carry and the echoes we cannot silence.
This double bill marks a deepening of Blakey’s artistic vision—starker, more intimate, and defiantly vulnerable. Both works exist in the space beyond language, where memory is fluid and the body archives feeling.
Part performance, part séance, A Wound With Teeth and Phantom offer no easy catharsis. Instead, they leave us suspended—in awe, in discomfort, in recognition. A necessary, unflinching experience from one of choreography’s most transgressive and transcendent voices.
Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth & Phantom. Photo Credit: Natasha Back
Premiering at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre from April 9–11 in London.