Unlimited supply of energy: Arielle Smith on making Luna (2024)

Choreographer Arielle Smith is a rare talent. Of Cuban and English ancestry, her parents met at a film festival, and Smith credits her immersion in film at an early age with the breadth of understanding of physicality she has absorbed, from major musical movie stars and comedians such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Having taught herself to dance from watching those films, formal training from the age of ten (at the Hammond School and then Rambert) provided a channel for her unlimited supply of energy. In her final year of training, she realised that all that energy sprang from a love of choreography.

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Arielle Smith

© Katja Ogrin

“I went into my final year quite ignorantly,” she says, “blithely thinking, I’m going to graduate, then I’ll make lots of choreography. The reality is that people need to know your work in order for you to get the opportunity to make work! As a 19 year-old who hadn’t done anything on a major stage, I should, in retrospect, have been totally daunted, but I’m like my Dad in that way – I just didn’t see limitations. In my last year at school, I wrote to Anya Sainsbury, who had taught us ballet solos at Rambert. I said that I had an idea for a piece that I thought was good, and that I would really like to be able to pay people to dance it. The Linbury Trust decided to support it as a project. I created a piece called Lots of Varied Expectations, an acronym for the word love, about the many ways love presents itself. My show was on Valentine’s Day – how could I ignore that!”

Etta Murphy, Matthew Bourne’s associate artistic director at New Adventures, encouraged Smith to apply for the vacant position of associate choreographer, having admired her work as a dancer. “Etta asked me if I was really sure I didn’t want to dance a little bit more before I hung up my shoes!” Smith landed the job. “I learned so much in that eighteen months. I went into it thinking, “I’m going to be Matthew Bourne’s assistant,” but actually, he let me choreograph bulks of that production (Romeo and Juliet). Having studied Matthew and New Adventures at school, it was amazing to be working in that company.”

That job finished the winter before the pandemic, and Smith focused on her own projects for a while. “A lot of my early career was pretty exhausting in that I couldn’t survive just on dance,” she says. “I had to work three or four other jobs to sustain my career, so that I could pay dancers.” Her next big project was Jolly Folly for English National Ballet, which won her an Olivier Award and a National Dance Award. “I think Jolly Folly is still the piece I’m most proud of; I absolutely loved making that. Getting a shiny award does help, sometimes in unexpected ways. Because I’m Cuban, getting a visa for America is complicated, but having an Olivier Award is something that the authorities recognise. Someone has noticed your talent, and given you something tangible to show for it. Before that, I think it would have been really difficult for me to get a visa to work in the States.”

Earlier this year, Smith created a one-act version of Carmen for San Francisco Ballet, her first narrative piece working alone. “It’s really challenging to do a narrative ballet that is only 35 minutes long,” she says. “It’s quite a task for anyone that wants to tell the story from a point of view outside the male perspective.”

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Luna

© Manvir Rai

Currently, she’s working with Birmingham Royal Ballet on a piece for their programme of works by female choreographers, Luna. “This is a unique experience in that we’re all making this show together, but we’re making it separately! I’ve set it on the dancers, but when I go back in a couple of weeks, for the first time I’ll see how it sits with everyone else’s work. All five choreographers are in conversation together all the time, but we’re very different creatives; where we’ve landed is, we’ve all got to do ‘us’. We’ve all got something different to say, and our physical language is different. You can’t try and pigeonhole yourself into something more blendable. Being different creatively makes the show more interesting, rather than trying to do something that’s quite linear tonally.”

Smith is also involved in creating English National Ballet’s upcoming new production of Nutcracker. “What’s nice about Nutcracker,” she says, “is that there are two choreographers, myself and Aaron Watkin. Other than working with Matt, I’ve never really worked in that way, and Aaron and I are very different. When I first came to it, I wondered how it was going to work, but actually, Nutcracker is a ballet that is asking for such variety. Being Cuban, one of the films I loved growing up was West Side Story. As a show or a film, that production begs for two choreographic languages. That’s something I’m really enjoying with Nutcracker. I’ve not previously had the privilege of working with so much set, costume, such high production values! It’s incredible. I never want an audience to have to read a synopsis. It’s our job to tell the story. I want the audience to feel engaged with that and to go on that journey, whilst interpreting it individually. But something like Nutcracker feels like they need to know, they need to be with you.

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Rhys Antoni Yeomans and Georgia Bould, English National Ballet, in Jolly Folly

© Laurent Liotardo

She’s forthright about the creative process. “I want to be a notator’s nightmare! I want my work to feel like a unique language of movement, something you have to see to understand. I really respect choreographers that can pre-choreograph, but I absolutely can’t, ever. I have to come to the studio; I know what feeling and maybe what shape of movement I want, but other than that, all I come with is music, and I’ll know that music inside out. Music is a huge part of my parents’ lives, my partner's a musician, we all talk about music. It’s so important to me. Even with Jolly Folly, which on the face of it has a very clear style and structure, the music came first; the concept actually didn't come to me for a while.

“I never really want to do work that is imprinted in a specific time: I want it to transcend time.” She continues emphatically, “I'm inspired by pieces and choreographers that are still relevant decades afterwards because of their relationship to the music and the art, bigger than dance, bigger than the choreographer. I think choreographers are most interesting when they realise that they're not the most important element. There's so much that makes a good piece, and it's not just one person.”

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English National Ballet in Arielle Smith’s Jolly Folly

© Laurent Liotardo

I get the impression she’s very good at collaboration. Is that how she gets the best out of dancers? “Oh, my God, yes, just being a human being,” she replies. “The hindrance of my youth is also my superpower: being younger and coming at it from a place of generational commonality with the dancers. I just don't think it’s effective for dancers to be in a studio working from a place of fear; we’re constantly told how competitive the dance world is throughout our training, so there’s this incessant inner dialogue telling you, you’re expendable. If dancers sense that someone is going to lead a room from the front with a hierarchical energy, they come to the work with a fear of doing something wrong. Level the playing field, and you can all operate in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We all want this thing to be good at the end of the day, no one's not got that intention.”

“I feel very privileged that I have a job that I want to do and don’t think of as work. I remind myself of that constantly. Maybe that’s why a lot of my pieces tend to be joyful. I find most choreographers’ work is most successful when they think of the audience as a character in their piece; you almost have to choreograph your audience. How do you want your audience to engage with your work? You should have the audience in mind all the time.

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Céline Gittens, Birmingham Royal Ballet, rehearsing Arielle Smith’s section of Luna

© Katja Ogrin

“I take my work really seriously. People have looked forward to going to a theatre, they have chosen to spend their evening or afternoon with us; that should be taken really seriously. I think that as soon as you're just doing it for your own interest you won’t make work that’s engaging. Go into it thinking about the audience. How do I want them to feel? I want to engage them in some way – how? In Birmingham, I open the second half, a really hard place to be because you need to get your audience back after the interval. So I’ve had to put myself in their position, imagining I’ve just had an ice cream. Then I have to hook them back in.”

2024 has been all about ballet companies rather than contemporary groups. “You’re often not in the place you projected for your career. I thought, if I’m lucky, I'll work with a few contemporary dance companies. I never thought I’d be a choreographer who works my whole year. This year was ballet companies, and I love it. I love it so much.”


Birmingham Royal Ballet’s
Luna runs at Birmingham Hippodrome from 3rd–5th October and at Sadler's Wells on 22nd and 23rd October

This article was sponsored by Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Unlimited supply of energy: Arielle Smith on making Luna (2024)

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