Ellen Kane is on a roll. When we speak, the choreographer and movement director has two shows running, Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre, and Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at the Donmar. She has just finished Why Am I So Single?, the follow-up from the writers of Six, the smash hit about Henry VIII’s wives, and she’s in rehearsals for the revival of Dear England, James Graham’s funny and stirring depiction of Gareth Southgate’s tenure as England manager. If you watched all those shows in a row, you would have no idea the same person had a hand in them all, such is the art of the movement director, a job that many may not even realise exists. But it’s an essential one.
“Outside actually directing a scene, everything that moves on the stage is usually done by me,” says Kane, chatting backstage at the National. That means any dance, obviously, but also scene transitions, characters getting from A to B, and working with actors on how they connect with the audience. She helps make visible a character’s emotional experience. “So that we, the audience, can feel it,” she says. “I love to feel. I can watch something and appreciate it, ‘Oh that’s beautiful.’ But do I leave moved?”
What is striking about those shows is how caught up audiences are in their energy – and part of Kane’s job is to shape that energetic arc, to make sitting in the theatre a visceral experience, as well as an intellectual one. In Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 the characters are at crisis point, tackling love, infidelity and the meaning of life. “Huge topics of human existence,” says Kane, “so the vibration of the person dealing with those things is large, right? We’re not just going to tell you about it, because that’s not how we live those experiences.” She doesn’t work by giving the performers exercises or moves to do, but by dissecting the text. “I adore finding the right energy for each beat, the sharp turns and corners you can take.”
On Dear England, one daunting job was to help actors morph into well-known footballers. Kane didn’t work much with Joseph Fiennes on his impressive Gareth Southgate. “Joe did that himself,” she says (Gwilym Lee will take on the mantle in the revival). But to hone the squad – Harry Kane, Harry Maguire, Marcus Rashford et al – she and co-movement director Hannes Langolf studied hours and hours of footage of the players, analysing mannerisms and tics. She brought in footballer Lee Dixon to teach them about penalties, drills and formations, and absorbed all of that into the show, generating the spirit of a match without ever passing a ball.
“Rupert Goold, the director, is a huge fan of football and he said, ‘Let’s bring in the ball.’ And I was like, ‘Ooh, that’s so dodge!’” She laughs and cringes. “Because you’ll never replicate the real thing. If there’s no ball, all they can feel is the tension in the situation, and our job is to heighten the tension.”
Choreography in theatre and film is an underappreciated art. Alongside movement director Polly Bennett, Kane is working with Equity to set up a choreographers’ network and tackle their low profile in the industry. “You know,” she says, “why aren’t there Oscars for choreography? Why aren’t there Baftas? Why aren’t we being credited?” Kane’s work on the film of Matilda the Musical is all over social media, for example (sample comments: “The choreography for Matilda is AMAZING”; “THIS MUSICAL WAS TOO SICK YALL GOTTA WATCH IT”), but her name is rarely attached. They are wrangling with IMDb over getting a proper credit on films, rather than being lost among the “additional crew” at the bottom of the page.
Not that Kane is out for glory. She’s just passionate about what she does, even if she never really planned this career. Growing up in (pre-gentrification) Hackney, London, there was the odd after-school dance class and a randomly chosen dance GCSE, but when dancers from Lewisham College came to perform at her school, she recalls: “I was just so moved by it. I was, like, ‘I’ve got to do that!’”
She went to Lewisham, which in the 1990s ran an inspiring dance course, full of late starters who’d never done a ballet class, many of whom have gone on to influential careers. That course is no more, and Kane laments that the decimation of the arts in schools will leave no pathway for others like her to get into the industry. “There are not many working-class people at this level. Now there will be even fewer. How do we get there if there is no exposure, no access?” You can’t argue it’s a superfluous subject, she says. “Dance changed the trajectory of my life. It has to be valid.”
When she went into dance training, Kane was adamant she would never do musical theatre. She performed contemporary dance with Richard Alston’s company and others. But she began choreographing as assistant to Peter Darling on Billy Elliot, and now at 50 she’s really hitting her stride, with two big musicals coming up, Nanny McPhee and Paddington. “I’m just loving my life,” she says, “and grateful that I’m given the opportunity to make these stories come alive.”
• Ballet Shoes is at the National Theatre, London, until 22 February; Dear England, is at the same venue, 10 March-24 May.
