Ivan Michael Blackstock Has Never Switched Off

He is on a video call wearing a black cap that says EGYPT in red letters, locs falling past his shoulders, a silver chain at his collar, a nose ring through his septum. He is relaxed in the way people are relaxed when they are genuinely comfortable in their own skin, which is to say he is not performing ease so much as simply possessing it, and he is funny without seeming to try, and he is honest in a way that catches you slightly off guard. When I ask him what people don’t know about him, he answers without pausing: I’m a scared little boy.

He explains it at length: the sensitivity, the experiences that shaped him, the fear that hardened over time into something that now reads from the outside as fearlessness. He has recently started training in stunt work, which involves jumping off buildings and setting himself on fire, and he describes standing at the edge of a roof knowing it is life or death, feeling that particular terror, and then noticing that it sits remarkably close to excitement and adrenaline. The work, as he understands it, is in channelling one into the other.

This is Ivan Michael Blackstock, from Peckham, South London, who left school at sixteen with no GCSEs and has since choreographed for Beyoncé, won the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production, toured the world with the Pet Shop Boys and Kylie Minogue, and built a creative platform that has launched artists now working with Drake and Kendrick Lamar. He also created TRAPLORD, a work he has been making and remaking for nearly eleven years, which began in an abandoned leisure centre in East London and has since played Sadler’s Wells, Factory International in Manchester and Kampnagel in Hamburg, and heads to Rotterdam in November. He is already planning shows for 2029 and 2030, which tells you most of what you need to know about how he operates; his partner has to physically pull him away from the work, and the only reliable stillness he has found in recent years came from taking up a Philippine martial art called Eskrima two and a half years ago.

“I’m a scared little boy. But as I’ve matured, that fear made me very fearless in certain areas. It makes me a high achiever. It makes me go for impossible things.”

Ivan grew up watching American television the way a lot of South London kids did in the nineties and early two-thousands: as a window into somewhere else entirely. The first magician he ever saw was his mother, who could cook and paint and dance and hang wallpaper, and after her came Michael Jackson, whom he describes as the first real epitome of Black excellence he encountered; then hip-hop, and then Lil’ Bow Wow, who was the same age as him and already doing it, which meant that he could do it too.

He had been dancing from a very young age, encouraged in part by a cousin who toured professionally and became one of his earliest reference points. By sixteen, things at home had been difficult enough that he had already moved in with his grandmother, and school was effectively behind him. “I knew that my brain worked differently, and maybe that’s why I leaned into movement and dance so early,” he says. “I felt like I could express myself a lot more than, let’s say, words and writing.” It is a quiet admission, delivered without any particular weight, and it explains a great deal about everything that followed.

He tried music production at college and struggled: he had the beats in his head but no idea how to get them out of it and into a computer, so he spent most of that year dancing in the corridors instead. A friend suggested he study dance properly, which he did, working through ballet, contemporary, tap, all of it, before dropping out and being picked up almost immediately by another school on a full scholarship, where he stayed for nearly two years while taking commercial jobs in between. Then he auditioned for the Pet Shop Boys, booked a world tour, and that was nineteen.

“I stepped into a portal. The magazines, the fashion, the music, all of it American. That was the Disneyland I wanted to go to.”

— Ivan Michael Blackstock

It was around this period that he encountered Butoh, the Japanese avant-garde form, and he encountered it the way he seems to encounter most things: obliquely, through cross-pollination, through spending time with very different kinds of people and noticing connections that nobody else was bothering to make. He could see how the goth aesthetic rhymed with Butoh; how a two-step reads differently in Asia than in Africa than on the American west coast; how the same movement gets used for entirely different purposes depending on who is doing it and why. It expanded his sense of what storytelling could mean, and it shaped, he says, not only how he makes work but how he moves through the world.

He was twenty-nine when he started TRAPLORD, and what started it was fear. “I was coming to it at the age of 30 and I was like, oh, I need to be a man soon. I haven’t achieved these things in my life. Where am I going? Am I actually doing the right thing?” So he gathered a group of men around him, people he trusted, and set out to build not a show but a brotherhood: somewhere they could simply be, and where, through his own story, he might help them open up and begin to heal.

The space was an abandoned leisure centre in East London and there was no budget at all; someone had simply said they had a room going spare and invited him to activate it. He brought some of his boys and a few other young men he thought were interesting and had something in them, and for a while he just let them occupy the room. Over time he began infusing it with art, with games, with tasks, and out of that, gradually, a show emerged.

The first performance took place in a tiny theatre in Essex that nobody has heard of, and what happened afterwards told them everything they needed to know. “I had some real road men cry in my arms,” he says. “We had to call an ambulance because there was one guy who was in shock and he couldn’t move. His eyes fixated on the stage.” Ivan stood in the middle of it wondering what exactly they had done, and understood straight away that whatever it was, there was something in it.

“Men don’t really speak about domestic abuse, or being stabbed, or someone passing away: things they haven’t shared with anyone else. We hit something on the nail.”

— Ivan Michael Blackstock

TRAPLORD was built in 2015, a year before the first wave of Black Lives Matter, and that convergence was not lost on him; Top Boy arrived around the same time. What audiences encountered was something they had not quite seen on a stage before: not backflips or crowd-pleasing dance moves but men telling real stories through rap, spoken word, visuals and props. He describes it as a Pandora’s box, in the sense that the surface invites you in with the swagger you expect, and then you break the seal and find men with feelings and grief and questions about love and sexuality that nobody had been asking them out loud.

TRAPLORD won the 2023 Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production, and the whole thing felt to him like watching a film: the walk down those enormous stairs in Prada, the speech, the weight of the award in his hand. What was unusual was that it stayed with him at all. “Usually I’m just so on to, like, next,” he says. “All right, done that. Boom. Cool. Killed it. Next thing, because we still need to be making money out here.” This one landed the following day, when he woke up and found it sitting there in front of him and his phone going off because the ceremony had been televised. People in his community, some of whom had known him since he was eight years old and dancing in the scene, told him it was overdue, and he half agrees with them; but it arrived on God’s timing, he says, and that was never his to choose.

“I walked down the stairs in Prada, did the speech, held it. Everything you envisioned as a little boy on TV, happened. And I thought — that is crazy.”

CRXSS PLATFXRM came out of frustration. He was making good work, work that genuinely served the community, and it was not being platformed or receiving the love he felt it warranted, so he decided to build the platform himself. He was also watching what his mentor Jonzi D had done with Breakin’ Convention, the international hip-hop dance theatre festival he founded at Sadler’s Wells in 2004 and has run annually ever since, and he had felt first-hand what it meant to be taken under someone’s wing, shown the ropes, and have knowledge deliberately passed down. He wanted to do that for other people.

He was also tired of being labelled an emerging artist. “I’ve been in this for a hot minute,” he says. “I’ve done the commercial, did a world tour, I’ve already choreographed for Adidas. What are you talking about?” So he built something with a different logic. “There is no hierarchy on the flyer. You come to this event and everyone’s equal.” The person working with Kendrick stands beside the person making things in their bedroom. No guest lists, no red tape, no activation you need to know someone to get into.

When he begins listing the artists who have come through CRXSS PLATFXRM, one name stops the conversation. Akinola Davies Jr. directed and co-wrote My Father’s Shadow, the first Nigerian film ever selected for Cannes’ official lineup, which took a Caméra d’Or Special Mention in 2025; Ivan mentions him almost in passing, alongside Saul Nash, Bianca Saunders, Greentea Peng and Kojey Radical, several of whom are now winning BAFTAs and Grammys or directing music videos for Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Watching that happen, he says, is where the satisfaction lives: he believed in them early, and they went on to do the thing.

Near the end of the call, just before we wrap up, I ask about the cap, the one that says EGYPT. Ivan explains that he went in May with his partner to celebrate her fortieth birthday and had been trying to be disciplined about not buying anything, right up until he saw the hat. He wishes now that he had bought two, because he goes through hats at roughly the rate other people go through trainers, which is to say every couple of months, and this one is nearly finished. He likes that it carries a bit of Africa around with him, and he likes that people ask about it.

An ordinary day, he admits, does not really exist for him, because he does not switch off; on what is supposedly a quiet day he will be doing deep dives into AI and working out how to make his practice more efficient, and he is already several years deep into planning shows for 2029 and 2030. The one thing that reliably delivers stillness is the Eskrima, which is weapons-based and therefore demands total attention: sticks, knives, blades, and the immediate consequence of getting hit if your focus drifts. Peace, he says, is what he is chasing, and the reason he works as hard as he does is to eventually arrive at it.

His favourite artist, he says, is himself, and he says it the way Lil’ Wayne says it, with complete sincerity and no apparent self-consciousness; through his neurodiversity he has never had a single favourite anything, and he takes inspiration from everyone, from the biggest names to people nobody has heard of yet. What he is really doing is trying to find himself as the best artist he can be, building what he calls a castle of peace. The best inspiration, he believes, comes from the almighty, and it arrives entirely on its own schedule. “There’s a process of waiting,” he says. “I study, I work, I train, I push, I do the meetings. And it doesn’t mean I have the idea. Then I wait. And it can come from me walking down the street, someone saying something.”

“My favourite artist is me. I’m trying to find me as the best artist. That’s the artist I’m trying to find.”

As the call winds down he mentions an activation he is putting together for December and says he would like to invite us, that it would be good to meet properly, in person; and he says it with the warmth of someone who actually means it rather than someone being polite at the end of an interview. Then he signs off and, one assumes, gets straight back to work.

He is, as he told us at the very beginning, a scared little boy: one who has won an Olivier Award and held it in his hands in Prada while his phone lit up, who has had road men weep in his arms, who is planning work four years out and going through a hat every couple of months and has still not found a way to switch off.

He is, in his own words, learning to navigate it, embrace it and integrate it. On the evidence so far, he is doing considerably better at that than most.