How do you measure success in the performing arts — ticket sales or standing ovations? For Fallen Angels Dance Theatre, a company working with and for people in recovery from addiction, the most telling metric may be tears. Almost every story they tell me culminates in people racked by sobs, whether they are recovering addicts, prisoners or audiences.
“There are always tears,” the artistic director Paul Bayes Kitcher admits, “but tears of healing and compassion.”
The company is grounded in Bayes Kitcher’s own experience. As a soloist with Birmingham Royal Ballet, he always felt like “the black sheep of the company”, he says. “I worked hard and played hard, and at the age of 30 it caught up with me. Only my career was holding me together. When I retired from the company, the drink and drug use took off 24/7, until I ended up in rehab.”
His journey back was via Fallen Angels. Based at Storyhouse in Chester, its workshops have expanded and its productions have grown in ambition since he set it up in 2011. The latest, Traces Through Time, is a collaboration with Brighton’s New Note Orchestra, the world’s first recovery orchestra. It is being performed at the Royal Opera House on Saturday.
The performers, who are both amateurs and professionals, share a past. “When I was dancing, I was so unhappy,” James Henson says. He was formerly a dancer with Ballet Bern, and leaving the stage was traumatic. “My drug use started because I was trying to fill a gap — I replaced the joy of moving and being creative with taking drugs.”
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In rehearsal, Henson pivots with diamond precision. But is he ever wary about stepping back into dance? “I had a bit of a meltdown a couple of weeks ago,” he admits. “One of my old teachers from the Royal Ballet School will see me at the Royal Opera House, and all of a sudden I’m back into thinking, ‘Am I good enough?’ I was in a bit of a tizz.”
Addictions can easily replace the intense dedication that dance demands — you need an alternative passion, Bayes Kitcher says. “If you had told me 15 years ago that I’d be working in prisons with people who have never done any movement before, I would have laughed at you. But I come out of prison sessions lit up, even in environments that can be frightening.”
Is working with prisoners intimidating? “It can be quite volatile,” Bayes Kitcher says. He recalls an armed robber, just released, “heroin addict, skinhead, angry. He showed me this painting he’d done in prison, of Jesus Christ being ripped apart. I had goosebumps — the pain, chaos, torture, but also this pinprick of light, a little bit of hope. It took your breath away. When I showed the guy the footage it inspired, he broke down in tears. He’d never seen contemporary dance, but he connected with it.”
Recovering addicts can find dance daunting. “One guy in rehab said he was more scared doing the dance workshop than heroin detox,” Bayes Kitcher says with a laugh. Even when clean, you’re left with what he calls “that hole in the soul”, which creative work can fill.
“The people in Fallen Angels, including Paul, have experienced something life- shattering,” the company’s creative director, Claire Morris, says. “They’ve overcome a horrendous disease that most people couldn’t even imagine. If we can tell those complex, challenging stories, then hopefully the public can understand more about recovery.”
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In rehearsal, I watch Tom, who may be in his seventies but can still touch his toes without strain. Forty years sober, he embodies calm, but that isn’t without cost. Bayes Kitcher tells me that the group worked with the dancer Hannah Rudd, who wrote a “very powerful poem about how her love wasn’t strong enough to save her dad, who died from alcoholism”. Tom says that it made him understand for the first time his own daughter’s struggle to forgive him.
Fallen Angels’ impact is clearly remarkable. But is it fundamentally an artistic or therapeutic project? “It’s both,” Bayes Kitcher says. “People are baring their souls. The most incredible thing for me is seeing people come in to our workshops who are totally broken, even suicidal. We start work and they settle — and within six weeks they’re performing. When you see people healing it blows you away. The artistic work is the icing on the cake.”
Traces Through Time is at Storyhouse Chester (Wed) and the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London WC2 (Sat), fallenangelsdt.org
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