‘Getting into your emotions is difficult for men’: dance artist Botis Seva on getting to the heart of hip-hop

The choreographer found himself in a dark place after his son’s birth. He talks about drawing on his fears of being a father to create the Olivier award-winning BLKDOG

When Botis Seva was a teenager, you would find him in one of two places after school: detention or dance class. Growing up in Dagenham, east London, “I never liked the idea of school,” he says. “But if it was Tuesday or Wednesday, we knew we had to just be good for a whole day and then it would be straight to dance.”

It was a hip-hop dance class, where mostly girls and a few boys would practise tricks. Seva couldn’t do tricks, but he loved dancing and, within a decade or so, he went from those classes to winning an Olivier for his piece BLKDOG, without much in the way of formal training in between.

We meet in a nondescript room at Sadler’s Wells theatre, where Seva’s company Far from the Norm will perform an extended version of BLKDOG. Seva, 30, is warm, easy to connect with and quick to smile; his character is quite different from that of his work, which at first glance seems full of shadowy angst, anger, alienation and crisis. In BLKDOG, hooded figures lash out in brooding darkness, militaristically drilled. There is a sense in Seva’s dance of permanently being on edge.

BLKDOG, which premiered in 2018, came out of the emotional place Seva was in at the time, just after the birth of his son. At 25, and as the first of his friends to have a child, he was struggling with fatherhood until one day he happened to pick up a book, Shoot the Damn Dog by Sally Brampton – a memoir of depression. It struck a chord. “It wasn’t necessarily depression,” Seva says of his own situation, “but I was feeling anxious about how to be a father. I started writing these ideas down about what fatherhood meant, what it means to be in a dark place, to be lost. There’s so much fear. My biggest fear was: how do I love? You look at [children] and they’re so innocent, you want to give so much. But I haven’t learned love in that way; my dad was not around. I was afraid: what if I get it wrong?”

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