Full Biography by Clement Crisp

A key to the way Kim Brandstup shapes choreography – makes it tell stories, explore moods, stimulate our reactions to movement – lies in his initial interest in cinema, and his formal studies in film at the University of Copenhagen as a young man. The visual drama in the revealing of human relationships, the language established by the camera, have stimulated Brandstrup’s style as a choreographer, and it is important to understand this initial link to his creativity. That dance would later claim him is part of his own realisation that the making of movement would prove more satisfying to his quest for expressive means.

His four years of study with the eminently wise dancer/teacher/choreographer Nina Fonaroff is crucial in the shaping of his dance-style. Fonaroff had been a dancer with Martha Graham, and had then become a vital force in the life of the young London Contemporary Dance School, where Brandstrup worked with her, and found in her a wonderful guide. She taught him to have confidence in his early choreographic essays, and when in 1985 Brandstrup set up his own small company, Arc Dance, his dance-making had an assurance and a clear identity that spoke of a talent already sure of itself. For the stagings which he made during the next two decades, both for Arc Dance and for the increasing number of companies that sought his creations, Brandstrup demonstrated a gift for movement that boasted dramatic intensity and a sure sense of emotional nuance. His Orfeo was cast in a High Baroque style which insisted both on the hero’s sense of isolation and the watchful power of Death (a role brilliantly taken by Kenneth Tharp), and - with its “happy” ending in which the lovers were re-united - a refreshingly generous involvement with his characters.

There were creations from this period which spoke of Brandstrup’s ability to condense and even intensify a dramatic scheme in his choreography, as in his powerful Othello and The Return of Don Juan (both made for Irek Mukhamedov) ,and also to find an allusive or elliptical style to bring a plot to elegant dance-life. His Cupid and Psyche, created for the Royal Danish Ballet, was a full-evening piece which held us with its oblique and fascinating narrative means (as also by its dance), and his Mysteries told of religious beliefs and their outward forms with exceptional finesse. His “commentary” on the life of Hans Christian Andersen in The Anatomy of a Story-teller, and his Antic (which studied aspects of Hamlet’s action) were works which illuminated their themes with an almost insidious skill: choreography exposing narrative in an oblique yet revealing fashion. And this, it must be noted, by means of movement both subtle and penetrating. And, be it also noted, with an economy and a stylishness of decorative means that has ever given a particular elegance, even an austerity, to Brandstrup’s stage.

Since he has sometimes (often, indeed, in his earliest creations) been obliged to produce his work on a restrained – and even severely restricted - budget, his natural sense of the power of a single significant statement to frame his dramatic scheme, has given his productions a finely drawn and evocative framework. His theatre, as we have come to recognise it over the years, is subtle, working by hints rather than declamation, with a discretion of means that can seem understated, but yet retains an undeniable force and penetration into its theme.