Before ever stepping foot in a dance studio, Ben Duke – 2011 Place Prize winner, artistic director of Lost Dog, and creator of works for the likes of Rambert and Scottish Dance Theatre – obtained a first class degree in English Literature from Newcastle University. ‘I was fed all the usual dead white men stuff: Dickens, Thomas Hardy and so on,’ he says wryly during a phone call from his London base. ‘I think I’ve always been most interested in writers with a completeness of imagination, people like Tolkein with his Lord of the Rings series, and Shakespeare. There’s a whole world outside of what they’ve written. The stories they tell are just snapshots of entire universes.’
Despite loving his academic studies, Duke soon began to feel something was missing from the traditional, cerebral approach to literature. ‘I was bored of being inside my head, and felt like there was a whole other part to the human experience that isn’t to do with words, analysis, and this logical, rational approach,’ he says. He decided to train at the Guildford School of Acting to discover a different way of relating to his favourite texts, but when he arrived, he realised ‘we were still just studying and looking at words. But Shakespeare wasn’t imagining that when he wrote his plays. He created works to be embodied on stage.’