Hello,

I am Bakani Pick-Up, I’m a Zimbabwean born UK based freelance Choreographer. I didn’t always want to be a dancer, in fact that was never on my radar. After my GCSEs I wasn’t quite sure about what I wanted to do with my life so I was advised to think about Art subjects for A-Levels. I took Media Studies, Photography & Dance as a back against the wall decision. A decision that 10 years later has led me to where I write this letter to you from. In between that I had the pleasure of studying (BA) choreography at Falmouth University & Trinity Laban (MA). Whenever I reflect on how lucky I am to be where I am today, I think about how disillusioned I was when I finished college, I had considered dance for Further Education but then I got a D in my A-Level Dance. It’s always the most peculiar of feelings when you feel like you have failed at the thing you’re supposed to be good at, or better yet, a thing that is supposed to define you. Looking back I’m pretty sure this D mean’t that I couldn’t amount to enough UCAS points to vary my choice in Universities. I didn’t have enough for Falmouth but I was fortunate enough to have a resounding reference.

At 18 I already felt like Dance wasn’t for me on a daily basis, so I rested, I took a year out to reconnect with the last 12 years of education I had been through. It wasn’t until 2013 I felt I wanted to explore this world of dance. I started university when I was 19, this world was different and unfamiliar and in truth nothing like I had hope for or expected, it was better. I felt at home in Falmouth as I nurtured my thought processes. Up until now, every book I open or every dance I make, it’s informed by an ideology that was built in a place I never knew I wanted to be. I always trust things will go the way they are supposed to. Although I must add that I don’t follow this instinct blindly.

When I imagine 22 year old me at graduation, what I was feeling and thinking was that my life was about to take off, job offers galore, the kinda schedule I imagine Anna Wintour has, to work like the machines dance training perpetuates. I soon realised through my practice at Laban that I needed time, time to ask questions, reflect & create, it is not so easy to accomplish these things when you are chasing auditions and performing for other people. I have since actively made the decision to prioritise my own curiosity, my own ideology of how dance in the ever distant future will look like. This requires time, a sense of time that can easily be misplaced into thinking that finding your feet or even the right path has a limit. I wish I understood this when I was at university, every project felt like it needed a conclusion, so I never dared ask the questions that were unanswerable.

The landscape has so vastly changed since 3 years ago, the politics around dance careers and who gets one is challenged every single day. Being an ARTIST is whatever it feels like to you, it could be working with Phoenix Dance Theatre and touring the world or in Communities that require a more intimate experience for movement. It could also be outside of performance or dancing, the skills you have trained so hard to nourish during your studies are only supposed to be a foundation. I would hope you never feel like there is a right way to be an Artist, there is isn’t, every thought and ambition we have, whether microscopic or macroscopic, it is essential to our individual survival, to follow it.

It is safe to say that 2020 hasn’t been the year any of us would have hoped for, but something that is so special to me about human beings is our ability to adapt, it is because of this the future is forever unpredictable. I will leave you with a note that has helped me feel somewhat okay in this ever-changing and unpredictable world of ours:

“Sometimes the most powerful revelation one can have is that circumstances have changed. That the rules you are accustomed to no longer apply. That the successful tactics may be tactics that would have been rejected under the old rules. That can be liberating. It can spur you to question your assumptions and help you rise above your fixed paradigms and restructure your thinking.”

- Leonard Mlodinow

I do not know what the future holds or what it looks like but, I do know that it starts with us projecting “an inner vision into the world”.

Godspeed, Bakani x