Suba’s blog | Staying close to the practice and why it matters

Our Artistic Director, Suba Subramaniam, reflects on a season of being on the ground, and why that proximity matters.

It has been a season of being back on the ground, and I have so enjoyed it.

A real highlight was being invited by Outdoor Arts UK to speak at their Climate Cafe at Out There Festival. It is a wonderful format, an informal, conversational space for people across the outdoor arts sector to talk honestly about climate and sustainability. I spoke about Akademi’s Pravaas, and about how sustainability has sat at the very centre of that work, not as an add-on or a tick-box, but as something that has shaped the choices we have made about touring, materials, and how a piece of outdoor dance can sit lightly in the landscapes it visits. It was an energising experience. 

That same thinking runs through Pravaas itself, our ongoing outdoor work. There is a particular joy in choreography that has to negotiate wind, pavement, passers-by, and changing light, rather than the controlled hush of a theatre, and a particular responsibility in making sure that work travels and exists in the world as sustainably as possible. Outdoor work asks artists to be porous to their surroundings, and audiences quite often end up encountering the work rather than simply watching it. Sharing the process of Pravaas felt like an honest way of inviting people into how the work actually gets made, sustainability questions and all.

I have also had the privilege of being a dramaturg for an artist this year, sitting alongside her as her ideas take shape. It is one of the many rewarding parts of this job: helping someone find the shape of what they are trying to say, asking the questions that unlock a structure, sitting in the position of not-knowing with them until something clarifies. Being in the studio with live musicians, watching a piece unfold in real time, hearing a phrase of movement find its rhythm against a phrase of music, never stops being exciting. It is a different kind of listening, and I learn something every time.

And then there is Akademi’s hospital work. Spending time working alongside dance artists in a hospital setting has been some of the most quietly important work I have done this year. It is humbling, and it is a privilege, to see what dance and movement can offer in a space defined by illness and uncertainty. I come away from those days with a clearer, more visceral understanding of why this work matters than any report or evaluation could give me.

I say all this partly because I think it matters, as an Artistic Director, to stay close to the practice itself. It would be easy to spend this role entirely in meetings and funding applications, talking about the work rather than doing it. But the applications we write, the cases we make to funders and partners, are so much stronger when they come from first-hand experience. When I have actually stood in the rehearsal room, walked the outdoor site, sat at a hospital bedside, the case for this work writes itself differently. It comes from the heart as much as the head, because I have lived it, not just advocated for it.

I am deeply grateful to the artists, musicians, dramaturgs, festival partners, and everyone who let me be part of these processes this year. Here is to more time on the ground.