London’s annual international Dance Umbrella festival is at once a venerable institution and a crucible for the new. Founded by Val Bourne in 1978 and nurtured by Betsy Gregory, this year’s festival is dedicated to the memory of Emma Gladstone, who ran it with pioneering enthusiasm and taste from 2013 to 2021.
She died earlier this year, and on opening night the current artistic director, Freddie Opoku-Addaie, who took the reins in 2021, made an emotional speech and asked everyone to dance for her. Like his illustrious predecessors, he is shaping the programme afresh, introducing new global trends, encouraging the new, the bold, the transformative.
