The choreographer and creative director Ian Spink, who has died of lung cancer aged 76, stretched the possibilities of what dance and performance could be. He established his name with Second Stride, the dance company he co-founded in 1982 with the choreographers Richard Alston and Siobhan Davies.
It was the first British contemporary dance company to tour the US and, especially under Spink’s sole directorship from 1988 onwards, gained a reputation for adventurous multimedia performances that were unconstrained by genre boundaries yet remained respectful of craft and medium.
Spink’s sensibility, physical imagination and fluid ways of working were a formative and often transformative influence not only for dancers and choreographers but for artists such as the playwright Caryl Churchill, the stage designer and director Antony McDonald, the composers Orlando Gough and Judith Weir, and the theatre directors Tim Albery and James Macdonald. Churchill credits Spink for changing her ideas of what a play could be. Weir remembers a level of collaboration that she has found rarely elsewhere.
Among several remarkable works that resulted from Spink’s explorations of interdisciplinary performance was Further and Further into Night (1984, with Gough and McDonald), a forensic examination of movement in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, choreographically completely transfigured using ideas from film editing. Fugue (1988, with Churchill), for Channel 4 television, was a flight of fantasy into audiovisual surrealism, featuring four pianos, an airborne 80-year-old and a funeral pyre.
In Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991, with Churchill, McDonald and Gough), dancers, actors and singers “conversed” in their own languages of movement, speech and song to tell interlinked stories of three poisoners.
Featuring 13 singers, three musicians and two dancers, Hotel (1997, with Churchill, Gough and the stage designer Lucy Bevan) was a kind of jazz opera that ingeniously orchestrated disparate parallel stories, recounted simultaneously, into a free-flowing yet coherent whole.
Spink’s expansive genre-straddling, however, made him a slippery subject for the arts market and for funders, who found his work hard to categorise. Second Stride lost its Arts Council funding in 1991 because it was no longer viewed as a dance company, but the council decided partly as a result to set up a combined arts fund, which continued to support the company until it disbanded in 1997.
The opposite of a grand director, Spink acted rather as a guide, facilitator and co-creator, letting performances take their shape from and with the people making them. Works would often gel nerve-rackingly close to their public presentation. He was committed to the ideas and practices of collaboration, devising his own “Fast and Dirty” residential workshops in the 1980s, creative crucibles that brought together artists of widely differing disciplines to make work in a quick but ordered way.
One of four children, Spink was born in Melbourne, Australia, to John, a research chemist, and Lorna (nee Hart). He attended Highett high school before training at the Victoria Ballet School and Australian Ballet School. He performed with the Australian Ballet from 1969 to 1974 and joined the Dance Company of New South Wales (now Sydney Dance Company) in 1975.
An early inclination towards choreography led him to a more contemporary style, and he created works for several Australian companies, twice winning the Australian National Choreographic Competition, in 1973 and 1976. In 1977 he arrived in the UK to attend an international course for choreographers and composers, and also presented work at the ICA Dance Platform in London. In 1978 he formed his own company, the Ian Spink Group.
Spink soon caught the attention of Val Bourne, director of the Dance Umbrella festival in London, who in 1982 invited him to join Alston and Davies in forming Second Stride, a kind of “super-group” intended to raise the profile of British contemporary dance, at home and abroad. A landmark company, it became most closely associated with Spink from 1986, by which time he had already spread his wings much wider, working for other dance companies, and in choreography and stage direction for the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, English National Opera, Opera North, Scottish Opera and Glyndebourne Opera.
In the mid-90s Spink and his partner, Lucy Bevan, whom he married in 1998, moved from London to the village of Dernol in central Wales. Though he continued to work with large institutions, Spink also began creating on a more local and intimate level, often connecting people to place and landscape.
Separating from Bevan, Spink returned briefly to London before moving to Aberdeen in 2005 with his new partner, the actor Selina Boyack, to take up the directorship of Citymoves Dance Agency. In the same year, he launched the annual performance festival Dance Live. In 2010, Spink joined the Work Room in Glasgow, a creative hub for artists working with dance, movement and choreography.
In 2012, with the sound artist Bill Thompson, he founded Airfield, which in addition to running workshops and residencies provided a more personal outlet for Spink’s own still experimental artistic work.
He is survived by Boyack and their daughter, Stella, by two daughters, Rosa and Ruby, from his marriage to Bevan, and by his siblings, Julian, Vivian and Janet.
• Ian Spink, director and choreographer, born 8 October 1947; died 11 October 2023
