At the age of 18, Charlotte Edmonds was such a promising choreographer (“astonishing”, in the words of the Observer) that the Royal Ballet invented a whole new job for her. As the company’s “young choreographer”, she spent three years learning everything she could at one of the world’s biggest dance institutions. “It’s mad to think that happened,” she says, a decade on.
With that kind of start, you’d expect Edmonds’ career to have followed a predictable narrative, choreographing for the big ballet brands, maybe setting up her own company. But that’s not exactly how it’s gone. Her eclectic portfolio reflects how the dance industry has changed and become ever more precarious, but also expanded in uncharted directions. She has indeed made short works for a number of European ballet companies, but she’s spent more time recently making films, music videos and adverts for the likes of Budweiser and Nike, as well as advocating for artists with dyslexia and launching her own video series, Cameo, in which she interviews female and non-binary choreographers to counter a lack of representation.
