Your brain needs theatre

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What happens when a cultural institution refuses to stand still? For more than two decades, Sir Alistair Spalding has made the case that the arts thrive on risk: new artists, new audiences and ideas that might not work until, suddenly, they do.

The artistic director of Sadler’s Wells joins Georgina Godwin to discuss the creative gamble behind one of London’s great cultural institutions. Since taking the helm in 2005, Spalding has helped move contemporary dance from the margins towards the mainstream, more than doubling audiences while giving choreographers the freedom to experiment, surprise and occasionally confound.

Now the story has a new stage. With Sadler’s Wells East open in Stratford, Spalding is turning his attention to the next generation: the dancers and choreographers who will shape the art form, and the audiences who might be encountering it for the first time. It is also an experiment in what culture can do for a place – not as decoration added after the buildings go up, but as part of what makes a city interesting, imaginative and alive.

Spalding and Godwin discuss the pleasures of the unexpected, why artistic institutions must take risks and what live performance can offer in an age increasingly experienced through screens. It is a conversation about dance but also something larger: how we create the conditions in which good ideas, new talent and culture itself can flourish.

Watch the episode on YouTube below, or listen via your preferred podcast app.