Kicked out of conservatoire during her hard-partying years, Doherty has gone on to become one of the most exciting choreographers of her generation. Now she’s teaming up with Jamie xx for a dread-filled new work
The last time I saw Oona Doherty, she was rolling out of a car boot in east London, nervily hitching up tracksuit bottoms, hair slicked like a close crop, transmitting wiry masculinity. It was a performance, called Hope Hunt and the Ascension Into Lazarus, that burrowed into the persona of the mouthy, sometimes maligned, working-class male. And it was a character she so completely embodied it was hard to imagine it wasn’t part of her.
But the woman on my laptop screen could not look more different: blond bob, big smile, just dropped her toddler off at nursery, tasteful grey walls in the background of her living room in Bangor, a seaside town near Belfast. As a performer, she has that ability to dissolve the membrane between herself and her character. And in person there is the same sense of being quick to connect, unguarded and without artifice, funny and sweary in a hybrid accent that betrays her move from north London to Northern Ireland aged 10.
