Downtime with Kate Prince

DOWNTIME - interviews with dance artists & arts leaders, talking about dance & the arts

My guest on Downtime today is Kate Prince - the AD of Zoonation – and the choreographer behind the massive hits Some Like it Hip Hop, Into The Hoods and most recently Message in a Bottle – a show set to the music of Sting which premiered at Sadlers Wells in Feb 2020. She was also, as we’ll hear, choreographer on the west end hit Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, and she co-wrote SYLVIA at the Old Vic. Her commercial credits include Strictly, the Olympic Games of Beijing, The tour de France and Nelson Mandela’s birthday party.

Kate and I had a right old chat at the end of June 2020. She taught me a thing or two about the various ways her shows are produced, what the term hip-hop actually means, how projects can be tailored to support working mothers if the will (and the cash) is there, and sadly, about the appalling racism members of her company have had to endure. Some of that might be hard to hear. We also talked about how her work is motivated simply by the desire to tell stories, how different audiences respond differently to those stories, and the tricky territory of crediting dancers for choreographic input to a show.