Dancer Katie Love

If you’re thinking that pink hair looks familiar, you may have been one of the millions of viewers who tuned in to watch Katie leap her way into the final of BBC talent show So You Think You Can Dance. For those of you who didn’t watch the show, this is no fluffy, Pineapple Studios-type glitterfest. The show demanded months of relentless training, a catalogue of different techniques and a weekly live performance. Exhausting to watch, even if, like me, you spent every episode lying horizontally across the sofa eating Twiglets.

Although she was pipped to the winner’s post by tap dancer Matt Flint, Katie’s creativity and style won her an army of fans and has catapulted her into the world of competitive contemporary dance. I caught up with her over a coffee in Borough Market, to hear her plans for life after that TV show.

Katie tells me she caught the dance bug young, starting classes at the age of two as a way of dealing with her shyness – ‘my parents thought it would be a good way to boost my confidence and get me talking to people.’ She went away to train at musical theatre and dance school Bird College at the age of 16, followed by a brief stint dancing on a cruise ship. ‘It wasn’t the best job’, she says diplomatically.

Faced with the prospect of trying to make herself heard about the noise in London’s notoriously tough creative industry, Katie admits to feeling a bit lost at this point in her career. She started teaching, something she enjoyed but wanted to move beyond. ‘I love teaching, but it’s very easy to get stuck there, especially if you start young. But it did give me the chance to start to choreograph a bit, and gave me access to studio space’.

The dream has always been to start her own company, and that chance came two years ago when Katie was awarded funding from the British Council to set up a Youth in Action project. ‘Over four months I had a big team of under-25s working with me, and we put together a music and contemporary dance show at Stratford Circus. That was my big moment, but of course in the end the funding ran out’.

She admits she was ‘having some downtime and waiting for the next big thing to come along’ when she decided to audition for So You Think You Can Dance. ‘It went a lot better than I thought it would’ she adds modestly. ‘I can’t believe I actually went through the process of it. I’m glad I did it.’

No reservations about putting yourself at the mercy of a TV crew and the great British public?

‘To be honest, my only reservation was that it would be a complete waste of time. Is it worth putting your life on hold? But I was always a big fan of the American show, and had been waiting for it to come to the UK.’

While many talent show contestants visibly crumble as the pressure takes its toll, Katie remained consistently upbeat, down to earth and seemed genuinely happy to be there.

‘I think I thrived actually,’ she says. ‘I loved the whole thing. I really enjoyed being around the whole production of it – I think it made me even more determined to do my own thing. Meeting all these different people has been amazing.’

Chatting about plans for the future, we spend a happy ten minutes imagining that the grumpy man sitting with his back to us is actually Richard Branson, and that he’s going to turn round any moment and offer Katie a million pound investment in her next project.

‘If I had that much money, I’d open my own theatre’ she says immediately. ‘It would be a quirky arts venue, a multifunctional space with an on-site training facility and an in-house company, across the spectrum of the arts.’ Would there be cake? I ask.

‘Of course there would be cake! There would be a whole restaurant. That’s my other passion actually, food. I’m a big cake fan, I love to bake’.

Cake-themed chat soon brings the conversation round to our current location. ‘I love Borough Market’ Katie sighs. ‘I could happily sit around here for the rest of my life and not get bored as long as I had some money in my pocket to buy some nice coffee.’

If you were tempted away from Borough Market, where would you go? ‘I love the South Bank, the National Theatre is amazing.  I love the West End… I like walking the streets of London. It’s busy, it’s fast paced, but if you’re not in a hurry you can really enjoy it. That’s the biggest problem in a way – London is filled with so many hot-headed commuters who just miss the point because they jump on the Tube and don’t look around.’

Is it a good place to be as a dancer? I ask.

‘It is tough because it’s so expensive. If you’re an actor or a dancer, there are so many studios here but it costs so much to do a class. That’s why I want my own training facility, where it’s a little bit more open.’

Richard Branson, if you’re reading this – how about it?