Lloyd Newson

DOWNTIME - interviews with dance artists & arts leaders, talking about dance & the arts

Lloyd Newson OBE is a director, dancer and choreographer. He formed DV8 Physical Theatre in 1986, and the company went on to tour across the world for decades, winning 55 national and international awards including the Prix Italia, Rose d'Or and an International Emmy Award.

Shows include:, the hard hitting, physically combative, politically charged My Sex; Our Dance, Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men; poetic pieces with more of a sense of narrative and/or design - Strange Fish, Enter Achilles and The Cost of Living; and the later shows where Lloyd combined his physical languages with verbatim text - To Be Straight With You, Can We Talk About This and John.

Lloyd retired in 2022 and DV8 was closed down. Some of the work is archived through Digital Theatre and the company archives are now part of the Theatre Collection at Bristol University.

Lloyd and Lou spoke late in 2022 about the journey of DV8’s work, the rage and sense of injustice that drove him, whether dance can bring about social change, and how Lloyd strove to make work that ‘did what it said on the tin’. He also spoke about what he looked for in a dancer, how it wasn’t till the end of his career that he understood the support he needed in the studio, the burnout that led to him to retire in 2022 and the pleasures he is finding in life now – fishing and spending time with family and friends.