Excellence has
many voices.

Where it began

Boy Blue began in East London in 2001, when Mikey J and I joined forces to build something we wanted to see. He came to the work as a composer; I came to it as a choreographer. Those disciplines were never separate departments to us. The relationship between music and movement is the work. A beat changes what a dancer can say. A dancer can make you hear a piece of music differently.

We were part of a culture already alive with ideas, skills and stories. It did not need to be made respectable by somebody else before it could stand on a theatre stage. What it needed was room to develop, the discipline to keep raising our standards and opportunities for dancers to be taken seriously as artists. That is the work we began doing together.

Building a company means more than assembling people for one show. You have to create an environment where talent can be discovered, trained and challenged. The community around Boy Blue grew across generations and backgrounds. The company’s own description today counts seven regular groups, with people ranging from children to adults. That continuity is part of what I want the story of Boy Blue to mean. Each new dancer should be able to go further than the generation before.

The stage opens

Pied Piper: A Hip-Hop Dance Revolution changed the scale of what became possible for us. It began at Theatre Royal Stratford East, reached the Barbican and won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre in 2006. I am proud of that recognition, but an award is a marker along a journey, not the journey itself. The achievement was putting a work of hip-hop dance theatre before audiences who could see its craft, theatricality and ambition.

As Boy Blue grew, the Barbican became a lasting home. We became Associate Artists in 2009. A Night With Boy Blue brought different parts of our company and community onto the same stage, showing audiences the range of dancers we were developing. The people you see in those showcases are not an accessory to a famous production. They are part of the future of the form.

When people think of choreography, they may imagine a sequence of steps. What stays with me is the whole design of an experience: how movement changes in relation to music, how an individual stands apart from an ensemble, and how a group can make an idea visible. The Five & the Prophecy of Prana, Blak Whyte Gray, REDD and CYCLES have very different worlds and demands. Each has asked us to find a new answer while remaining recognisably Boy Blue.

When the whole world watched

London 2012 put our work in front of a global audience. I choreographed hundreds of young dancers for the “Frankie and June say thanks Tim” part of Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony. An Olympic stage is enormous, but the principle at the centre of the work was familiar: give dancers a shared purpose and enough precision to make the movement read at every scale.

For the young people involved, that was a moment on a world stage. It also made a point about who gets to be seen as part of Britain’s cultural story. Movement that had grown in communities and dance spaces could stand at the heart of a ceremony watched around the world. The visibility mattered, but it mattered most if it opened more doors after the lights went down.

We continued making work in many forms. Boy Blue co-directed the film R.E.B.E.L in 2018. Free Your Mind, created with Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, Mikey J Asante, Danny Boyle, Es Devlin and Sabrina Mahfouz, opened Aviva Studios in Manchester in 2023 with a live reimagining of The Matrix. That kind of undertaking asks a company to keep learning. There is no single size at which hip-hop dance theatre has to stop growing.

Into the classroom

One of the most consequential places our work has reached is the school classroom. Emancipation of Expressionism became the first hip-hop dance theatre piece included as a set work on the AQA GCSE Dance syllabus. I choreographed it, Mikey J produced the music and Danny Boyle directed the filmed version. Students can now examine its movement, structure and intention as part of studying dance.

That is a different kind of recognition from an award ceremony. It tells a young person that the forms they may know from their own life belong in serious artistic study. They can analyse them, debate them, perform them and make something new from what they learn. Boy Blue has also produced educational materials for teachers and students, because putting a title on a syllabus is only the start. The learning has to be useful in the room.

Education has always been more than an extra programme for us. Boy Blue’s East London dance company runs on Sundays across much of the year and draws young dancers from beyond London. The path from first class to professional company is not automatic; it takes teaching, practice and belief sustained over time. When a young dancer sees someone further along that path, the future becomes easier to imagine.

What comes next

I have had opportunities to work across theatre, television, film and public events, and I received an MBE for services to dance and the community in 2017. I value the recognition. But when I think about legacy, I think about what the next generation can make possible. Boy Blue’s work with the National Youth Dance Company on Gravity is one example of how the conversation continues beyond us.

There is still room for hip-hop dance theatre to surprise audiences and to challenge its own assumptions. There are still young artists whose work has not yet found a platform. The answer cannot simply be to point back to what Boy Blue achieved in 2006 or 2012. We have to keep building the conditions in which somebody else can go further.

What began with two artists working together in East London has become a company, a community and a body of work that travels between stages, screens and classrooms. Mikey J and I founded Boy Blue, but the story now belongs to everyone who has helped make it and everyone who will take it somewhere new.

This account was prepared on Kenrick’s behalf and approved by him. Research: Boy Blue · Boy Blue team · AQA.

The work that made a movement

Elma François knew the cost of labour long before she became a leader. Born in St Vincent in 1897, she worked while young and later left for Trinidad, where domestic work sustained her. These experiences placed her close to the lives of people whose pay, food and security were never guaranteed. When she entered public life, she brought those realities into the centre of politics.

It is tempting to tell the history of Caribbean labour through a handful of men at microphones. François was building a movement too. She helped form the National Unemployed Movement and the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association, known as the NWCSA. Its organisation reached female coal workers on the docks and domestic servants: workers who could otherwise disappear from the official record of industrial struggle.

Making the everyday political

Unemployment, hunger and the price of essentials were not separate from the question of who held power in a British colony. François and her colleagues linked daily hardship to collective action. They organised people who had been excluded from influence and insisted that a demand for bread could be a demand for dignity as well.

The movement also looked beyond Trinidad. Opposition to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia helped turn anticolonial solidarity into action among waterfront workers. For François, the fate of Black people elsewhere and the conditions of workers at home belonged to the same political conversation.

A trial, and her own defence

Labour unrest spread across Trinidad in 1937. François was arrested and charged with sedition, becoming the first woman in Trinidad and Tobago to face such a charge. The case put more than one person on trial: it tested whether a woman who spoke publicly for workers could be punished for the force of her organising.

François largely defended herself. She faced the colonial state in its own courtroom, explained her political work and was acquitted. That verdict is a remarkable part of the story, but the work that brought her there matters just as much. She had already helped workers find a voice, a structure and the confidence to act together.

The history she helped change

François died in 1944. Her work did not end with her lifetime: Trinidad and Tobago later recognised her as a National Heroine. Remembering her properly means seeing the domestic worker, the strategist, the organiser and the woman who spoke for herself. She did not simply endure a famous trial. She helped change whose labour and whose political voice could be seen.

Research: National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago · BETA Archive.

A child determined to learn

George Washington Carver was born enslaved in Missouri near the end of the American Civil War. His mother was taken from the farm when he was an infant and never found. The child who survived grew into a young man intent on learning, moving between towns and schools because education for Black children was restricted.

Racism shut one door decisively: a college withdrew his admission when it discovered he was Black. Carver continued. He homesteaded in Kansas, studied art and piano at Simpson College, and followed the encouragement of an art teacher who saw his close attention to plants. At Iowa State he became its first Black student, earning an advanced degree in agricultural science.

Why the soil mattered

Booker T. Washington invited Carver to lead agriculture at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1896. Carver would spend nearly five decades there. Many Southern farmers depended on cotton, a crop that could leave already strained soil less productive. Carver taught crop rotation and the cultivation of alternatives, including peanuts and sweet potatoes, as practical ways to restore land and improve a family's prospects.

His laboratory work found numerous applications for those crops. The familiar tale that reduces Carver to peanuts misses the central purpose: research was a way to address the economic vulnerability of Black farmers. An idea only helped if people with limited land and money could use it.

The classroom on wheels

Carver understood that many farmers could not come to Tuskegee. The Jesup Wagon, begun in 1906 as a movable school, brought teaching, demonstrations and supplies into rural communities. It carried lessons on agriculture, nutrition and household life to people who were otherwise excluded from campus learning.

The wagon shows how he understood science. He did not keep useful knowledge behind institutional walls. The work had to travel to the fields, homes and markets where its consequences could be measured.

More than an inventor

Carver was also an artist and a teacher of generations of students. These were not distractions from his scientific work: observation, experimentation and imagination ran through all of it. He died in 1943 after a life spent asking what the land could provide and how its possibilities might serve people whom the wider economy had neglected.

Research: U.S. National Park Service · George Washington Carver National Monument.

The people behind the problem

Nidal Tafah comes from a farming family. Her parents left the countryside in search of a more secure life; both grandfathers remained on the land and died poor. Their experience shaped a question that stayed with her: how could the people who grow food be left without systems that work for them?

Across rural Morocco, many small farmers irrigate plots of less than a hectare with pumps powered by butane. Fuel expenses take money away from households already exposed to rising costs and water scarcity. A farmer may save water through better irrigation yet still face a heavy bill for the energy that runs it.

A system built for the farm

Trained as a rural engineer, Tafah returned to the field and co-founded MIRRIAH in 2020. The company develops solar-powered irrigation kits suited to a farm's size, crop and terrain. It begins with an on-site assessment, then installs equipment, trains users and stays involved. That service matters because buying hardware alone does not make a system usable over time.

Instead of demanding the full cost upfront, MIRRIAH uses a modular “pay as you grow” approach. Farmers start by replacing a fuel pump with a compact solar kit and can use money previously spent on fuel to pay in instalments. As their means grow, they can expand the system. MIRRIAH reports that its customers can reduce energy costs by up to 80% and water use by almost half; these are company-reported outcomes, not a guarantee for every farm.

Who gets to build the future?

The work extends beyond individual installations. MIRRIAH trains rural women and young people as technicians, creating local capacity to maintain the systems and new ways to earn a living. Its reported reach includes around 800 farming families and 30 women's cooperatives. Behind those numbers is a different picture of a green transition: the people most exposed to climate and cost pressures help shape and sustain it.

In 2026 Tafah was named a Cartier Women's Initiative fellow. Her story belongs in this issue because innovation has a human scale. A pump that costs less to run can change a family's choices; a technician trained locally can change what expertise looks like in a village. Tafah is working on both sides of that equation.

Research and figures: Cartier Women’s Initiative fellow profile, updated March 2026 · BETA Archive.