Lithe Spirit

Brighton boy liam francis will return to his hometown this month to dance with rambert in the seminal piece ghost dances. He tells jenny Mark-Bell how hip hop led him to the uk’s leading contemporary dance company.

- Jenny Mark-Bell

IT is still January when your correspondent visits Rambert’s base on the South Bank to interview dancer Liam Francis, 23, who grew up in Brighton and will dance at the Theatre Royal in Ghost Dances this month.

Observing muscular young dancers perform logically impossible feats is an excellent way to feel those post-Christmas pounds weighing heavy on the conscience. But Liam wears his expertise and mastery of the form lightly. A pupil of Tideway school (now Seahaven Academy), he was an active boy – swimming competitively and playing football, squash and basketball – but dance didn’t enter his orbit until his teens. In fact he was with his brother at a chess competition when he discovered the joy of movement. “There was some music on and I was dancing about, and I just thought, ‘This is so much fun!’”

Soon after that he went to see ZooNation’s Into the Hoods – a hip hop fairy tale mash-up inspired by Sondheim’s Into the Woods – and his conversion was complete. He was intoxicated by “the power, the fun on stage. It wasn’t contrived, theatrical or over-thetop – you could see watching them that they were having the best time.”

Liam trained with ZooNation Academy of Dance from the age of 14, travelling from Brighton every Saturday to train after a busy school week. He joined the Youth Company in 2009 at 16 – combining rehearsals and performance with his academic studies at BHASVIC where he did politics, maths and English – his ambition was to be a journalist or a politician. But in his final year – in which he also studied dance at AS Level – he started to consider it as more than a hobby.