Here's an excerpt from our video interview with choreographer Jo Littledyke on how she created Hate Speech: The Dance.

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“We were asked by CSW to make this piece called hate speech, and we chatted a bit about what hate speech was and the violence that can go behind that.

Then they gave us a testimony of somebody who had experienced hate speech and we used that story and that was the basis on which we founded the rest of the dance.

We read the story lots of times and took different bits out of it… we chose key phrases and just worked on repeating those phrases and then we spent a lot of time improvising.

We wanted the audience to understand and get as much as they could from the dance and for it to tell a story and for it to be of impact.

We knew that it was going to be quite a difficult dance to watch; that it wasn’t going to be a nice dance or a nice piece of movement.

When we were all working on the improvisation and the movement it was quite exhausting and emotive. I think for Holly and Zoe [the dancers] to build up this sense of anger, and the topic we were looking at of course built up a lot of anger in them anyway and that came through their movement.

The more we developed it and the more we went through it the more we understood hate speech; the more we understood what people went through for what they believe in. And then the more our natural anger rose. I think that came across in the dance…

And there was a sense for Holly [the character defending her faith in the dance], who was trying to stand up for what she believed in and put up with a constant push from Zoe [the assailant] to say “No, you can’t”. And for something like that – to be cut and for there to be swords and just that repetitiveness… This was a real story. This is someone’s real story and just repeating that was a technique that we tried to use to really get it home.

And there was this sort of scream in the middle that we put in as a pause but as a nod to say look there’s this aggression and there’s this fear and longing to believe in what I’ve chosen but there’s this aggression of “No you’ve gotta go this way”.

I think for all of us it gave us a very real sense of a real story of what people go through and I think for all of us our eyes have been opened to what belief is and how much that can absolutely change your life. You will do anything to stand up for what you believe in.”

A big thanks goes to Jo Littledyke who choreographed this emotive dance, and to her dancers Holly and Zoe who did an amazing job performing it!