Liam Francis has had an unconventional journey to success. Over video call we’re about to discuss his newly formed Liam Francis Dance Company, his most recent works (A Body of Rumours, Lyre Liar) which will be touring internationally and a new project for 2027. His warm personality belies a self-deprecating sense of humour, and a fiercely self-critical attitude towards his work.
Francis came to dance late, he tells me. “I was at a chess competition because my brother played chess competitively. Sitting in a sports hall with my mum for days while he played chess, there was music playing. I was dancing because there was nothing else to do. My mum asked me if I would like to go to a dance class.” The family had just moved to Brighton and so he signed up to do some local hip hop classes. “I was 14 and one of my friends told me his sister was in a West End show,” he says. “I saw Into the Hoods by Kate Prince with ZooNation. I thought: What is this? They’re flying, spinning. It was like watching dance super heroes!”
Finding out that ZooNation had classes every Saturday he instantly enrolled. “When I was 16 they were recasting Into the Hoods,” he explains. “I auditioned and got to play the part of one of the Lost Children. I was still doing my GCSEs and didn’t know that I wanted to be a dancer.”
At this stage, he was still greatly unsure on which path forward to take. He almost laughs as he tells me, “At this point I wanted to be a politician. I had interviewed David Lammy for a radio station when I was younger. I also wanted to be a radio journalist, a BBC/CBBC presenter and a stuntman! I joined something called the UK Youth Parliament, representing young people in East Sussex – I know this sounds crazy! We had meetings in the House of Lords to discuss the concerns of young people and fed it back to our MPs.”
Francis went on to study theatre and then discovered he could do an A and an AS level in dance, in the same year. That’s when he learnt about contemporary dance. “Christopher Bruce, Merce Cunningham, Sidi Larbi Cherkouai, Akram Khan. Contemporary dance suddenly started to seem really interesting. I had been working at weekends as a commercial backing dancer for Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor when I auditioned for London Studio Centre.”
Already 18 when he did his first ballet class, “I had a wonderful teacher called Sue Booker who encouraged me to learn like a beginner,” Francis explains, “because I’d had a sort of side career as a commercial dancer. To learn like I’d never done any kind of dancing before, really grasp the foundations. I did ballet, Limón, Cunningham, Graham – like a true beginner. I fell in love with the core of the styles rather than the superficial aesthetics.”
Francis would go on to spend seven successful years with Rambert dancing principal roles, and having works created especially for him by internationally renowned choreographers. Why then, with all the associated risks, when he had had such an illustrious career working with ZooNation, Rambert, Akram Khan and Lost Dog and could work in any major contemporary company, would he break free and go it alone?
“When I left Rambert, I thought about dancing elsewhere,” he says. “I auditioned for a few places and had a few offers for some really amazing companies, but I realised that I left Rambert because the company was going in one direction, I was going in another. I wanted to make more of my own work, I wanted to find my own voice. I was feeling like I had spent a really lovely amount of time accumulating other people's knowledge, studying people. As my friend Miguel Altunaga says, it’s like getting tattoos, you know, every time you work with a choreographer, you get a tattoo.”
“My forearms were loaded!” he says. “I really enjoy contributing to other people’s visions, but I wanted to give myself some practice, and I was getting to the point when I was watching choreographers and thinking – I like that decision, but maybe you could also…” He concedes that he wanted to be the decision maker. In 2021, having made some choreography before, he made a conscious decision to focus on his own creations.
“Then my mentor, who’s still my mentor now, wanted to talk about ‘my’ company,” he continues. “I kept insisting there is no company, there won’t be a company – I just want to choreograph. She pointed out: ‘You have a producer, you’re touring shows around the world, you’re working with the same group of dancers, you’re applying for funding. What are you f*cking scared of? You have a company, why aren’t you saying it?’ And I was just super scared to say I have a company. If I don’t state that I have one, then I can’t fail at having one.”
Now that he has finally accepted his trajectory, I wonder if there is anything he misses about being part of a larger company. “Yes, there’s a lot I miss,” he admits. “I miss other people being in charge occasionally! I miss taking class every morning with a group of people who are dedicating the next eight hours to using their bodies to help bring someone’s vision to life.
“There’s something gorgeous about that first hour-and-a-half of a day, whether you’re speaking to people in the room or not, that you’re just all collectively in a room sharpening your tools, failing, succeeding, exploring together for this greater project than all of you, and that's a very, very beautiful experience. And the friendships you make in that time are very different to any friendships you have otherwise. They may not be people that I speak to for years, but the fact that we spent every morning doing that together – when I do see them, there's a special connection, because you've been in that space together.
“I miss that for my body, for my fitness, for that connection with people and to something greater than us. I try to do this in my company. We’re aiming for a bigger vision, whether that's the visibility of stories, or building a community, or an idea that is mine, but then everyone else is contributing towards it. It grows into something bigger than I could have ever imagined, but it's still me who’s in charge.”
I ask him about some of the choreographers who have inspired him the most. He seems to have a positive word for all of them but he cites Ben Duke’s Goat as one of his most rewarding experiences. “It’s porous enough as a choreography and a concept that it engages you every time very fully without it feeling like a piece of repertoire. I enjoy Ben very much. He’s a wonderful person to work with. His Ruination was my first creation after leaving Rambert. He’s a person who gives you loads of space to find your way through and embeds you in the work.”
He has recently been performing his solo show Lyre Liar in the UK and abroad. I’m curious to know how it came about. He declares that it’s still evolving.“What is the solo meant to do? To introduce me and the company to the world? I went round and round in circles and decided that I didn't want to do that. I didn’t want to try and give a snapshot of who I am: this is my movement vocabulary; this is what you can expect for the next 10, 20, 30 years. That terrifies me! I don't want to decide now what it is I want to be.”
He explains that development is key. “I left Rambert because I felt like I had learned so much from people but I don’t yet know what the culmination of things is or will look like. It will continue to filter and distil over the years, decades, hopefully, that I have my company – but right now it's as if I’m standing at a hob and I have onions, garlic, some tomatoes, and it’s like: what is he going to make with this? It’s a good starting place. People don’t have to go home thinking, ‘we’re glad Liam sorted that out’. This is just what I’ve got in my pantry at the moment! And I want the version of me that keeps reinventing myself, that audiences don’t know what to expect when they go to see a Liam Francis Dance Company show.”
He concludes by telling me, “When I scream my name out in Lyre Liar it’s like a gross, self-indulgent moment. It’s almost maniacal! It’s such a gorgeous feeling to do that on stage. It all just falls away. Exorcising these things – phew! That’s done!”
Liam Francis has won the Emerging Artist National Dance Award 2025 for his choreography.
