Five dancers were writhing and buckling in an East London studio, and Courtney Deyn had a question. “Can you drop your trousers as well?” Deyn asked: “You’ve got great legs — don’t be embarrassed of them.”
The performers were in varying states of undress, wearing fragments of dusty, bleached businesswear. Their high-octane movements suggested everything from ballroom dancing and commercial dance to the avant-garde choreography of Martha Graham.
The team was rehearsing for the British premiere of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the latest stage show that Deyn and Jacob Samuel, both 35, have created under the name Bullyache. Together, the London-based pair create hybrid works that draw on their working-class backgrounds and queer sexualities, combining dance and theater with self-composed scores and pop culture verve.
The vibe, according to Bullyache’s promotional material, is “Pina Bausch cosplaying as Dua Lipa.”
Deyn and Samuel started out making music videos, but as Bullyache they are now appearing on prestigious stages like Sadler’s Wells East in London — where “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” runs from May 7-9 — and the Venice Dance Biennale, which commissioned the work. Bullyache has also shown work in art galleries, choreographed fashion shows and created dance routines for other musicians.
“You watch contemporary dance companies and it can feel a bit one-note at times,” said Rob Jones, Sadler’s Wells’ associate artistic director. But Bullyache’s mix of styles gives it “an edge,” he said.
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a response to the 2008 financial crash, and Bullyache developed the show through research that ranged from watching the TV show “Succession” to interviewing investment bankers. Set in a shattered boardroom, the show is a kaleidoscope of scenes, exploring the masculine bravado of what Samuel called “gross” financiers with “frat-party-style god complexes,” heavy on violence and ritual humiliation.
There is also a large dose of the erotic. At one point, the dancers show off their muscular bodies in a kind of finance bro beauty pageant. Seducing the audience to select them as the winner, they are unaware that the prize is being suffocated, drenched in blood and laid out like a sacrificial victim.
“We’re showing people images and confusing things,” Deyn said, “and asking people to bring themselves to it.” It’s more ambiguous than much British stage work, Deyn said, “where everything is laid out for you in a particular way from beginning to end.”
Samuel, who grew up in northern England, played in noise bands and made punk-adjacent tracks, before moving to London for college. Deyn had competed in ballroom and Latin dance until age 16, and also came to the city to train in ballet and contemporary dance at the Rambert School.
They started collaborating after gradation, when both were collecting unemployment checks. At first, they made music videos for Samuel’s tracks, and then pivoted toward what Samuel called “hyper-bastard” stage works, in which of all their interests and skills were “pushed through a tea strainer to make this super sensory object,” he said.
Their first stage piece, “TOM” (2023), blended the myth of Orpheus with Deyn’s and Samuel’s experiences dealing with Britain’s unemployment agency. Another work, “Who Hurt You?,” which played at the Southbank Center in London last November, imagined a musician’s final performance in a world where theaters have closed and money for the arts has run out. The lead character was played by a drag queen pianist called Barbs.
Rosalie Doubal, a performance art curator at Tate Modern who follows Bullyache’s work, said that the duo’s “embrace of art forms that have typically been devalued by opera, ballet and museum stages feels super contemporary, exciting and very celebratory.”
She said that Bullyache, which has performed in London galleries including Raven Row and Hannah Barry Gallery, came from “a younger generation of artists who embrace a maximalist fluidity across genres and disciplines — which museums are paying attention to.”
Doubal pointed to the Austrian artist Florentina Holzinger, who will represent her country at this year’s Venice Biennale, as part of this cohort. Known for pushing her performers’ bodies to extremes — from stunt motorcycling to sword swallowing — Holzinger often prefaces her performances with trigger warnings for self-injury, blood and sexual violence.
“In an era where there is a sense of life being exhausting, and that we have to survive the moment,” Doubal said, such extreme works can give viewers “a temporary release.”
The dancer Pierre Loup Morillon, who is performing in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” described Bullyache’s choreography as “demanding.” The piece required him to learn new skills, he said, including ballroom dance steps.
Loup Morillon, who is from France, categorized Bullyache’s work as “very British.” French choreographers tend to start from a single idea or inspiration, he said, whereas Bullyache begins its process from a mood board and “with so much information, text and films.”
After being “fed by so many images and words,” Loup Morillon said, the dancers work through a series of tasks and improvisations. “We had to create our own scenes,” Loup Morillon said, adding that the dancers brought “their own universes” to the creative process.
During the rehearsal, the company worked on a scene in which they manipulated the exhausted, semi-naked body of another dancer, Giacomo Luci, before Loup Morillon dressed him in a button-down shirt and tie, and revived him with a smack on the bottom.
Deyn said that the sequence might have “something to say about masculinity, but maybe it’s just a reflection of the world we all inhabit.”
Like the show’s corporate figures, Deyn said, Bullyache is now working in a world of established institutions. The group “may be edgy,” Deyn said, “but it’s not punk.”
“We’re artists and we’re trying to express ourselves in any way that we can,” Deyn said. “For now the name and the aesthetic is working. When people start to expect what it is, we’ll have to hard pivot to something else.”
A Good Man Is Hard To Find May 7-9 at Sadler’s Wells East in London; sadlerswells.com.
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