Not way back, making an attempt to e-book Arlene Phillips in for a check-up, a nurse was looking for a date she may make. “I stated: ‘I’m sorry – I’m working.’ He stated: ‘Properly, it says right here you’re 80. What are you doing working?’” She informed him she had by no means given it a lot thought. “I get up, I am going to work, I like it.”
Not solely is Phillips working – steadily, some may say relentlessly – she’s additionally producing a few of her greatest, most inventive work in her ninth decade. Alongside her affiliate James Cousins, she has simply been nominated for an Olivier award for her choreography within the hit musical Guys & Dolls. “I’m seeking to ensure that the whole lot I do can be as ingenious, uncommon or as completely different as could be,” she says, “so I by no means need to repeat myself.”
Within the Nineties, Phillips choreographed the London revival of Grease. She additionally labored on the brand new model, which opened within the West Finish in 2022 and is about to go on tour, however it didn’t really feel like a retread of previous steps – this manufacturing is nearer to the unique present that pre-dated the 1978 movie. It’s, she says, “uncooked, edgy, visceral. Everybody’s tremendously enthusiastic about it as a result of we’ve acquired a really younger forged with some unbelievable performers – it’s youthful, it’s difficult. It has, in some ways, no relationship to the Grease that I used to be first concerned in.”
I believe it’s this consistently trying to find the brand new, and surrounding herself with younger folks, that makes Phillips appear so youthful. How does she preserve present and forward of dance tendencies? Can she be going to golf equipment to see what the cool children are as much as? I’m almost half her age and the thought exhausts me – I query, additionally, whether or not I ought to use the phrase “cool children”. Does she carry on prime of TikTok? She does, she says, and she or he has colleagues who deliver new concepts. Principally, she’s simply very engaged – she rattles off some new performs she’s seen in London, and a Pina Bausch dance piece at Sadler’s Wells Theatre.
Phillips continues to be greatest often called one of many authentic judges on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, which ended badly (we’ll come to that). However that was solely 4 years out of a 60-year profession in dance that introduced her a damehood in 2021 and has included choreographing stage musicals, together with Starlight Specific and We Will Rock You, and movies such because the 1982 model of Annie. She has created routines for music movies for a ridiculous variety of superstars, together with Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Elton John and Freddie Mercury. Within the 70s and 80s, her wildly attractive dance troupe Scorching Gossip modified, on this nation a minimum of, what mainstream dance appeared like. She has a status as a grafter with exacting requirements, however in particular person she’s additionally heat and grounded.
She all the time needed to be a dancer. Rising up in Manchester, the place her father was a barber, Phillips would hold round after her dance class, wanting to look at the subsequent. Her household had little or no cash, and her youthful sister gave up her personal dance class in order that Phillips may attend it as a substitute. “I believe dance for me turned a haven, a spot the place music and motion may take you out of any troubles or hardship. You didn’t have to consider something however listening to the music and getting your physique to reply, and the rest couldn’t contact you.” It’s why she thinks dance, and the humanities on the whole, must be important to the varsity curriculum and past. “Dance and music collectively is significant to wellbeing.”
When Phillips was 15, her mom died from leukaemia. Her father turned ailing across the similar time and Phillips, the center of three, felt answerable for the household, particularly her sister. “My brother left faculty to get a job,” she says. “It was actually robust, and counselling was remarkable. There was no: ‘Let’s cease and learn the way we can assist this household.’” She turned, she says, “very effectively schooled in placing all of that sorrow someplace again right here” – she touches the again of her head – “and simply storing it away so I may get on with my life. There was no different manner.” It additionally, she thinks, fuelled her willpower.
Phillips was at grammar faculty, however she missed a number of her schooling to look after her mom. There had been speak of auditioning for one of many London dance faculties on a scholarship, however that was now not viable. She and her aunt went to the council workplaces in Manchester to demand a grant to attend dance faculty within the metropolis as a substitute. “I bear in mind the constructing, the room – it was so foreboding. However I simply knew that’s what I needed to do.” She acquired it, and after learning, she turned a dance instructor, taking over quite a few part-time jobs to complement her revenue. At one level, she got here down with glandular fever and spent three months in mattress. “I’m not shocked. I used to be working across the clock.”
Her dance faculty despatched her to London to take some lessons and expertise the dance scene there. On her final day, she noticed an indication for a contemporary American jazz class, taught by the choreographer Molly Molloy, and fell in love with it, deciding there after which to remain in London. It helped that Molloy supplied her a scholarship, and wangled her a job as a live-in housekeeper for a then little-known director, Ridley Scott. “It modified my life. I didn’t go house, as a result of I knew if I had, I’d by no means come again. I’d by no means have had the braveness.” Was it a wrench to go away her household, who relied on her? “Hear, I’m born filled with guilt,” she says. “It was troublesome and that prompted a rift. I simply stated: ‘I’ve to do it.’ Ultimately they understood. It wasn’t that I didn’t love them – it’s simply that I needed to pursue my desires. And ultimately it did all work out.”
I’ve heard her say prior to now that she was by no means the very best dancer, however remodeled herself by sheer grit. “I don’t actually have a dancer’s physique,” she says now. “I’m fairly quick and stocky. Energy was my fortitude – I may soar as excessive because the boys, spin sooner, strong strikes. However by way of a phenomenal classically good physique appropriate for ballet, I used to be so distant.” Did it depart her with lasting physique picture points? “Yeah, I felt like my physique was all unsuitable, I used to be all unsuitable. I labored so exhausting and constructed my power and energy, however I may by no means compete. Some our bodies usually are not made like that.” Seeing a manufacturing of West Facet Story in Manchester made her realise she now not needed to be a ballet dancer. “And positively, once I got here to London to be taught American-style jazz, there was no state of affairs the place my physique wasn’t appropriate for the artwork I used to be pursuing. That was a revelation.”
Whereas Phillips was instructing in London within the 70s, she put a dance group collectively, that includes her greatest college students. She named it Scorching Gossip as a result of she hoped everybody could be speaking about them – a reputation they didn’t dwell as much as for the primary three years. Then they got an everyday slot on The Kenny Everett Video Present in 1978. For years that they had been thought-about too attractive for TV, however the nation was altering. “There appeared to be a vibrancy and a sexuality, the issues folks wore – Lycra costumes, intercourse retailers opening, and within the home windows these superb shiny PVC bodysuits. However, each time I switched on TV on Saturday evening, there’d be beautiful smiley dancers, normally tall and blond. Dancing all the time felt very protected on tv.”
Mary Whitehouse, the morality campaigner, was outraged. Does she have any sympathy with Whitehouse now? Did Scorching Gossip open the floodgates for skimpy clothes and attractive strikes? Phillips says she was all the time extra involved in regards to the stage of violence in popular culture, quite than intercourse, and it was necessary to her that the ladies within the group had been empowered. “They had been younger individuals who knew what they needed to do,” she says.
Within the late 70s, Phillips went to the US to work on a musical movie known as Can’t Cease the Music, a fictionalised biography of the disco group the Village Individuals. Members of the forged and manufacturing crew steadily began falling ailing – they didn’t realize it then, however this was the early days of the Aids epidemic. As concern and misinformation unfold, Phillips discovered the divide between those that had been struggling, and people with out the virus, painful. One buddy, who was HIV-positive, invited her for lunch and it felt as if he was difficult her to eat the soup he had made. “I can bear in mind how he checked out me as I had each mouthful.” By the late 80s, Phillips had musicals operating in New York, London and Bochum in Germany. “And simply one after the other, folks had been dying.” One in every of her assistants on the German manufacturing of Starlight Specific was in hospital, and a buddy – “one of many dearest loves of my life” – was in hospital in London. She remembers shuttling backwards and forwards between them, grief-stricken. “The remedy [of people with HIV and Aids] was disgraceful. It’s a scandal.”
Phillips threw herself into work. She was by now a single mom to her first daughter (she had her second, a shock child, on the age of 47 together with her long-term associate, Angus Ion, a carpenter and set builder she met on a Freddie Mercury music video within the 80s). As a younger girl within the trade, she says sexual harassment wasn’t one thing that actually affected her. “I believe I used to be fairly fortunate that I used to be by no means essentially the most engaging particular person round.” Sexism, although, was one other story. Within the 80s and 90s, she was usually the one girl in a senior place on inventive groups, and fuming at “the way in which some males really feel energy over you, the way in which they really feel, ‘You need to do as I say,’ which they by no means would to a different man. I’ve had folks not listening to my recommendations, and instantly shout me down.” She would stand her floor, however there have been different instances when the response to her was surprising and “vicious”. She remembers specializing in tapping her toes on the ground and keen herself to not burst into tears. “Typically a lady talking up or making an attempt to alter one thing offended some males.” Now, she says, “I gained’t let something go.”
Did her working-class background make her really feel like an outsider within the trade? “Yeah. I by no means felt posh in any respect,” she says with a smile (at her first dance class, she wore inexperienced ballet footwear as a result of the pink ones had been too costly). When she was instructing in London, Bianca Jagger was one in all her non-public college students. “She had many very posh buddies and I used to be like an amusement. I used to be invited out and it did really feel like I used to be there for some type of leisure, as a result of I used to be so extraordinary.” Did she thoughts? “I don’t assume it actually bothered me,” she says (Jagger was all the time type, she provides). “I knew my place. However I definitely noticed how the opposite half dwell.”
By the point Phillips was made a decide on Strictly – she and Len Goodman had been the primary to be forged – she was in her 60s and had already had a stellar profession. When she was the one decide to not have her contract renewed 4 years later, it prompted uproar amongst Strictly followers who couldn’t perceive why the achieved decide – and solely girl – was being changed with the a lot youthful, far much less skilled pop star Alesha Dixon. The fuss made it into the Home of Commons, the place Harriet Harman, the minister for ladies and equality, blamed ageism (the BBC denied this).
Given all Phillips has achieved earlier than and since, Strictly looks as if a blip – my view is the present was fortunate to have her – however I’m considering the way you climate one thing so publicly humiliating. Did it knock her confidence? She thinks for a second. “Greater than knocking my confidence, I believe it swirled round me, and I believed: ‘I want to search out myself.’ I wanted all of the psychological preparation that I may muster to go: ‘Grasp on a minute – you had an enormous profession earlier than this and also you’ve acquired work lined up.’ I believe I stepped up and out of it as quick as I may. When the rollercoaster goes down, discover the up.” She is angriest now about the way it occurred – the primary she heard was when a radio present known as her to ask her how she felt about it. “I used to be a grownup once I did that present, so I resent that the BBC didn’t come to me as quickly as that they had the thought.”
She doesn’t understand how lengthy she’s going to proceed to work for, although I can’t see her stopping. “I really feel fairly cool about what occurs now,” she says once I ask about remaining ambitions. “I’ve had so many extraordinary issues occur in my life.” It isn’t all about work. She has two grandchildren who’re, she says, “my world. My daughters grew up not realizing my mum, so I all the time vowed I’m going to be the grandmother I’d have beloved my women to have. I need to give them the love that my mom gave to me, be sure that I all the time have time for them each week, it doesn’t matter what.”
It’s a bodily job. “I can’t dance the way in which I used to, undoubtedly not,” she says, however provides she will be able to all the time clarify her imaginative and prescient. Does she nonetheless dance round at house? No, she says, except she’s working some steps out. She walks quite a bit, however she says she’s “completely satisfied to slob on a settee and do nothing”. Although “nothing” is relative in Dame Arlene Phillips’ world. “I’m by no means nonetheless,” she says. She sits with a e-book, a newspaper, a pocket book, a laptop computer and her cellphone, able to seize inspiration or observe down a gripping new thought at any time when it dances previous.