Dancer, choreographer & costume designer Stephen Galloway On the Art of Creative Movement

Interview by James Wright

Stephen Galloway’s career began in the structured world of classical ballet, but his creative language has always reached far beyond its boundaries. Trained at the American Ballet Theater and later rising to Principal Dancer under William Forsythe at Ballet Frankfurt, Galloway quickly emerged as a singular presence: instinctive, expansive and constantly evolving.

Since then, he has moved fluidly across disciplines, shaping the visual and physical language of fashion, music, performance, and photography. From the Paris Opera to the Kirov Ballet, from Creative Directing Issey Miyake collections to directing the stage presence of Mick Jagger and Miley Cyrus, Galloway doesn’t just choreograph — he distills, then guides movement into something at once spontaneous and precise. There’s a looseness to his style that belies its refinement. An openness that lets physicality reveal, rather than impose, meaning.

Across his many creative partnerships — with Inez & Vinoodh, Versace, and in his long-standing role as movement director for The Rolling Stones — he has become a trusted translator of rhythm and gesture. Someone who listens closely to others’ instincts and helps transform them into something visual, kinetic, and alive.

We speak with Stephen about building a physical vocabulary that’s entirely your own, why joy remains central to his creative process, and how to make a life that exists between structure and freedom, form and instinct, past and future.

James Wright:  What does the word ‘curiosity’ mean to you today? Would you describe it as your guiding principle?

Stephen Galloway: For me, curiosity is part of my DNA. Just yesterday, I came up with this concept called ‘the endless eye’ — a constant wave of curiosity that never stops. That’s something I feel has always been with me. The curiosity is the starting point and then it’s knowledge that continues the job. 

JW: Out of the various practices that inform your career and day-to-day, is there one specifically that nurtures that innate sense of curiosity? 

SG: I would say the complete and utter joy I take in doing nothing. There’s heaven in doing nothing. And simultaneously, the dream and the excitement of doing something. I really do enjoy that space in between imagination and execution. 

JW: Lots of people speak about time being the ultimate luxury. It’s incredibly difficult to come by in a world of constant dopamine hits. Are you quite disciplined when it comes to the time “in between” to think and to absorb and to be inspired? 

SG: I'm really good. I'm my best friend in that situation, I never feel pressured to do anything I don’t want to. I want to know that I have an entire day to do exactly what I like — whether it be doing the laundry, cleaning my air fryer, or deciding to research an idea. Maybe I'll read a book. Maybe I won't. I find myself giggling a lot. I have lots of mirrors in my house, so I often catch myself giggling. You know, Yves St Laurent once said, a home without a mirror is a home without a soul.

JW: It’s notable how much of your career has been spent in Europe. After almost two decades as the principal dancer at the Frankfurt Ballet, how do you view the contrast between the respective progressiveness and conservatism of European and American dance today. Is the difference partly in how they are funded?

SG: When you’re dealing with a repertoire company or legacy company, it provides a lot of challenges, because you have to maintain a piece, and that can restrict growth. Even legacy pieces we still adjust. I mean, if we’re staging a production in Korea, then I'm changing the costumes because they're in Korea, so we make it for them. Of course, the structure will stay the same, but there’s an evolution. 

When Bill (William Forsythe) took over in Frankfurt, the company was still performing a classical repertoire — Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker. His first season there, he still had to perform a few of these pieces, because people had bought a season subscription. They were paying for Swan Lake, so he couldn't just come in and say “You're not getting Swan Lake anymore, I'm gonna do my own thing”.  

Everything moves in waves. The problem I think we have right now — and I call it the America's Got Talent Virus — is that every dance company, big and small, are doing these sort of synchronised movements for extended periods of time, often twenty minutes. It's started to feel like audiences currently appreciate synchronicity and endurance over individual artistry. And the choreographers are doing it because they're seeing it's working. And the programmers and the artistic directors are buying it because people are excited about it. 

So it's a weird thing. I don't know who's responsible. Because is it the audience saying give us more group pieces that we can scream and stomp about to, or is it the director programming a piece that is going to use the entire company, which is going to get this response? I mean, someone like Crystal Pite, who’s an incredible choreographer, she has a few pieces that utilise large ensembles, but hers are different.

On Instagram, I'm seeing so many of these pieces and they're all just starting to look the same. So that’s why I reference America’s Got Talent, because they often have these dance troupes with fifty people on the stage, all moving at the exact same time. And everyone's minds are blown. Like, humans can do that together? And I think that's what it is — that people don't believe that we can actually move together. It is just viscerally, visually impactful in a way that a principal dancer or a pairing of dancers isn't in the same way. And it's a notable change, this kind of viral choreography.

JW: Why do you think that classical music, opera and ballet remain somewhat silo’d and resistant to change? 

SG: I recently found an archive video of a ballerina who was in my company: Victoria Mazzarelli. I was watching it thinking oh my gosh. I literally had to stand up and scream, because what she was doing was at such a high level. And that was just a normal rehearsal day, it wasn’t a performance, but it was at such a high level, because we were trained to not waste an audience's time. Time is precious. These arts take up an audience’s time. Because we understood the audience isn’t going to come back to see your second show, they're not going to see you grow in a role. You only have that one time to impress or move them. I had that as a kind of mantra — to dance not as if it was the last time, but to take it further, not to get better in it. There was no concept of progression. I didn't get better in my role – I was great and I just got greater. 

It’s the same when I'm on set for the first time, or with a new person. I can't think that our relationship is gonna get better on our second job together. Our relationship has to be at the most now. 

JW: Can you explain for the uninitiated the difference between a ‘creative movement director’ and a ‘movement director’? 

SG: To me the difference is a creative mind. I know that sounds harsh or high-minded, but it's about working with creative intent and less with a movement directive; to do something with intent as opposed to reflex. 

Some of my favourite jobs have been the ones where you can’t tell I was there, because it’s more nuanced, more sophisticated. I mean, I love a good: “five, six, seven, eight”, and I can give you that like nobody's business, but I find that feeling of when I'm able to help expand the physicality of the talent or expand the idea of the director or expand the idea of the photographer to be way more gratifying than showing the model doing a grand jeté. 

I do feel that being called a creative movement director rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I haven’t experienced it first hand but a few of my assistants have had encounters working with A-list photographers who just don't see the reason they’re there, because they think that they can do it all themselves.  

JW: With your new venture, The Movement Kreative (aka TMK), I read that something called the ‘Galloway Technique’ is going to be taught. Can you speak to what that is?
SG: I get a lot of people asking to shadow me, because often they don't really understand what it takes and they want to see. And I get that, you know. So with the ‘Galloway Technique’ — I think I'm looking for a better name for it than that — the thing that I would personally like to  encourage is listening. And listening doesn't necessarily have to be acoustic; it can be done physically. It’s more observational, but almost in a non-optical way. I guess it's a philosophical thing.

Often when I'm on set, I squeal. I've squealed in front of some of the most iconic people and it's so embarrassing. But if I squeal, it's when it's real, you know? The squeal technique! 

JW: How does that kind of excitement and emotion shape the atmosphere of your collaborations? Joy and trust seem to move quietly beneath so much of what you create. 

SG: I think that often the element of joy comes from how much you allow yourself. You know, there was a lot of improvisation involved with Bill and our company, because he was thinking “I can choreograph incredibly, but often the decisions that you're going to make from an improvisational standpoint are going to be ten times better than mine. So let's figure out a way that we can do them both”.

JW: And that felt revolutionary at the time?

Yes, very much so, because it was allowing the dancer to claim agency over their performance in a way that they might never have before. Because, to second-echo Swan Lake, in a production like that, there's a historical load put on top of the performance, you're doing something which has always been done before, but when you're working in the repertoire the way we did, you were constantly doing something that was going to be new and most likely would never be done again, because it was improvisational. 

You could always tell when a person was faking it, because they would do the same step twice in their variation, and then it wouldn’t be truly improvisational because they were actually doing it again, each show or the next show.

JW: The delicate dance between spontaneity and experience is interesting. Do you believe, having done all that you've done, that there should remain classical foundations to classical ballet? 

SG: Five...100 billion percent. It is the deepest of the foundations, in terms of the mindset, the understanding.

One of the issues I have with dance today – and this sounds so c**ty – is that everyone's out there wiggling. I was recently watching a rehearsal  of a choreographer friend of mine who comes from a younger generation. He was working on a piece with a company and I was in town so he invited me to come along and watch the rehearsal, but he actually said, “But you're probably gonna wanna leave soon because I have these dancers who can't dance”, because the idea of them formalising a phrase of movement longer than an Instagram post is a challenge – they can't remember it. They can wiggle and improv and feel good in their body for days, but they can’t maintain choreographic intention, choreographic phrasing.  

They'd be like, “Oh, can we stop? Can we go back?” It was this whole stop-and-start thing, where I was like, Why are they thinking about it like this? That's how dance is. It's a continuation until you stop it. It's not move, move, move, stop. It’s constant motion. 

JW: I was curious to get your take on fashion and fashion photography in relation to the shift from film photography to digital in your time. How do you view the mix of implicit risk of film photography and what it brings to creativity? Today, you could argue that anyone can press a digital shutter 20,000 times and get a decent picture. From a choreography and  movement perspective that must have materially changed things a great deal for stills photography? . How do you feel about that, and working in photography today?

SG: It's really frustrating because...

I've been on set recently with a photographer — four techniques, a Digitech over here, a Digitech over there...I'm like, Who are all these people? I blame certain photographers, who have normalised having five assistants, and made the process extremely diplomatic. I’ve had challenging moments on set where there's been way too much discovery and conversation about what's on the screen. I'm like, Do you see what's all there right now? Why do we have five people judging here? Let's go over and work a little bit more on it. You know what I mean?  

I think that’s a problem that comes with having to have the instantaneous, finished project immediately, that you can walk home with at the end of the day. 

And the thing that’s happened as far as styling is concerned is that basically they're just shooting look-books — it's got to be a full look or nothing. The last shoot I did, there might have been a different pair of shoes…but back when Karine (Roitfeld) was still at Vogue, we’d do a whole collections issue. Now, what are you going to do? It's like the look is there, and you can change the hair maybe, but that's basically it.

JW: Yes, Grace Coddington or Lucinda Chambers’s styling imagination would likely not have been possible today. 

SG:  It would just be to be there and to control whether or not it's the same way it was on the runway.

JW: How do you feel about photography as an art form and your role within it?

SG: I have to invite you into my house because my entire collection is photography. I love photography. The challenge I find now is that it doesn't need to be good, it just needs to exist. And everyone knows that, so people have become lazy in their work, and commercially, it seems like that's what's being asked for. The amount of photographers that I see out there, taking bad photographs, and getting all the work. They're not even challenging themselves, because they know it's bad, because no one's challenging them. 

You don't have those great art directors anymore. They're very few and far between. I recently worked with Donald Schneider, who’s an incredible art director, who was there with solutions. He wasn’t there to, you know, paste together some mood board that he’d collected from Google. He was there to create an image, or to create a movement in the film, to create a dynamic. 

Having said that, sometimes they can be valuable. I was on Jennifer Lopez shoot recently and the photographer had a mood board because Jennifer wanted one. I love working with her because she's incredible. It was the second time I'd worked with her. She didn't remember the first time, although it was a cover of a magazine, but whatever (laughing). She had a lot going on at the time...

She took a look at some of the mood board pictures and the ones she liked were all my pictures…and then she was a little bit more receptive to being guided. Because, you know, it is often a thing that certain people, particularly women, want to claim full responsibility for how they are being perceived. Others enjoy the collaborative relationship, and some don't care at all — they’d rather just be told what to do; they have that trust.  

JW: Can you perhaps expand on that way of working with talent a little?

One of my favourite moments was working with Monica Bellucci, who was all those women. We were working on a project for Cartier, and it was life-changing. She literally walked onto set in this tiny little dress, and the air in the room changed. I've been fortunate enough to work with a lot of incredible people, but the air stopped.

It was a full film set, a hundred people on set, and she made it to her position and she looked at all of us. I was like, This bitch is going to wear us out. It was fantastic. I thought, Yes, I can die now. She had to do a lip sync thing, and she does this really incredible thing where she can look underneath her eyes so she always looks like she's either about to make love to you or kill you. It was quite daunting – even for me, a big black gay man!

When we did the first take, she said “Oh it's so nice to have you with me.” She said, “Oh, Stephen, I will do anything for you. Just tell me what to do. I trust you completely.” It almost does become like a pas de deux. It's never about me telling them what to do. I'm never taking away from who they are. I'm basically trying to enhance them. 

It was the same with my relationship with Mick Jagger. I hate that it came back to bite him in the ass, just because of the way the media works and because it was clickbait for them to say “Mick Jagger's choreographer is this ballet guy”. So he was hearing that over and over again, but I was never Mick’s choreographer. If anything, there, I was a movement director, there to basically make him look more like himself. Mick was an incredible dancer twenty-five years before I met him. He's always had his own distinct style. What I tried to do was to make him be more of himself. After being one of the world's most galactic superstars for seventy-five years, he wanted some help. He said “I’ve been doing the same thing for twenty-five years, give me something new to do!”

JW: Costume design has played a much bigger role in your career than I initially realised. At the Atelier in Ballet-Frankfurt, even in the beginning, were you aware that you had a shared philosophy across movement and dance and costume design, or did you view them as two independent, distinct interests?  

SG: I made that distinction later. I didn't realise at the time because I was too busy doing it. In the very beginning, I was doing the costumes of the pieces that I was actually dancing in as well. So I didn't have the time to figure it out. It was only later that I realised I was using all of the same tools that I was using as a dancer, as a costume designer. 

I must admit I had the best upbringing because...in German opera houses and ateliers, you have to be a master tailor or master couturier. At that time, contemporary costumes were basically just leotards and unitards in different colours.

I saw a horrible performance recently in Los Angeles and the costumes were so bad. They had a hood on. I thought, Why is he in a hood? It was freaking me out. It's more of a challenge costuming contemporary dance because it somehow veers between a pedestrian element, versus them being contemporary. 

We had this one piece called Alien Action — and it was incredible because the piece started out only having six people, it was only a small ballet. And because Bill was the director and we had all the freedom in the world, we could say, Oh, we're having a premiere. It's gonna be just with six people and we'll bring some repertoire in from another ballet, because he was the sole choreographer – several choreographers in one choreographer. That was the genius of Bill because no one piece looked alike. 

So I started out designing the costume for Alien Action. It was only going to be a smaller piece just for six or seven people. Next thing I knew, it was the full company, four acts, and in the third act he wanted kimonos. I’d never designed kimonos. Bill said he was visualising something like if Led Zeppelin wore kimonos. Anyway, they turned out great. I did green makeup, and they were fantastic. They were all different inside, I mean it was fantastic. 

It sometimes breaks my heart because the work that we did was so revolutionary and it changed people's minds about art and about theatre and about themselves. And you just don't see them anymore.  

JW: But if you don't mind me asking, how were you principal dancer and also designing costumes for the whole troupe? How did that work in practice? 

SG: Well, Bill was always like, I know Stephen can do it. 

JW: But you were working six days a week?

SG: I would sometimes not finish out big jumps in ballet class because I would have an 11 o'clock meeting upstairs in the atelier to do fittings! It sometimes worked in my favour because I could come in late for a rehearsal and pretend I didn't know what was going on, so then I'd be able to get a solo out of it later. It was an incredible time. There were no rules. The only rules were to break the rules. 

JW: And how much of your day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month involves costume design now?

Not as much as I would actually like it to. I'm going to be doing a production in Holland with the artist Trajal Harrell in June, and I have to speak with him today because I have absolutely no idea where I'm sourcing the whole thing from or what they're gonna be yet. Trajal sent me a message saying “I'm listening to a lot of Bjork” so I'm not really sure what that means but I guess we'll figure it out. But I would like to do more. I think I'm gonna revert back to it maybe...

Because I miss making dance. I mean, I'm literally a child of the opera house.  

Just being able to be witness to some of the greatest, greatest operatic performers — Michael Gielen, who's probably one of the last great conductors he was my f*** GM. I’ll never forget — I had just joined the opera, I was sixteen years old, and I got in the tiny elevator and he was in there. I said I’d just joined the Frankfurt Ballet, and I asked, “what do you do here?”And he said, “Well I’m the ​​Intendant. I'm kind of like the general manager of the opera, and I conduct the orchestra”. And he said, “Do you like opera?” And I was like, “Yes, I do a little bit”. 

And I did, because my grandfather used to make my sister and I watch great performances,  which came on the weekends. That was my first exposure to singers like Leontyne Price. For his generation, she was such a hero.  So we'd sit and watch great performances of Live from the Met with Jimmy Levine...So to go from that, to having it in my front yard...

There was a moment a couple of years ago where my goal was to do one opera and one ballet. Billy said “You need to be directing opera, you're really good in the big arena, much better than I am,” And he kind of pushed me to do a few things but they never really worked out the way I wanted them to and so I kind of got distracted by this whole fashion thing. 

JW: In the beginning did it feel like a whole new world had opened up to you when you stepped into the world of movement in fashion and music?  

SG: No, not really. Because I didn't have time to think about what I was doing. I was just participating in it and being happy in it. I don't really like it when people consider me an anomaly, because it feels singular...but at the same time, I have always felt singular, in a way, being the only black person. That's why I've never really had such a huge problem with racism, because I've always been the only one. I mean, I was on the cover of basically the German version of Time Magazine my first year — “Stephen Galloway: the dream dancer”. It was hilarious. I didn't know what was going on, but I was here for it. 

The one element of performing that I miss is the ferociousness I used to have as a performer. I was very elegant because of my height and my length, but I could be very ferocious. And I’d like to get some of that back.

JW: From what you’ve said, it feels as though the current state-of-play in dance and movement has almost evolved to be less something that's choreographed on foundational principles and more on human gesture and spontaneity. Do you view that as a positive thing overall or does that worry you?

SG: It worries me, because there's something divine in rigour. There's something heavenly in repetition to a certain degree, in discipline, in refinement. That's where the divine happens. Though of course, there are moments when it happens randomly, like a storm, which I love.

JW: With the internet, arguably came democratisation. Do you feel that people are developing a stronger sense of self through personal movement as a result, and do you think that democratisation can help people understand that they all can move instead of sitting in front of screens all day?

SG: There's a side of me that would love to see dance on Instagram, but with no comments, you know? I would be really curious to see where that would take us.

Bill and I did this ballet called The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, and it's probably one of the most technically difficult ballets out there — it's still selling. And there is something about when you see that ballet, which has the exact same effect of the America's Got Talent thing that I was talking about earlier, but that for me, is the real version of it. That reaction, caused by seeing a dancer who is so in tune with his body that it is creating this vertiginous thrill, versus the reaction that happens when you just basically see people doing things together. Something being carved out of time and space, dancers who are striving and pushing themselves to the edge of the universe to accomplish ballet. 

JW: The word ‘elite’ and ‘elitism’ were once positive and aspirational, but both have extremely negative connotations now.

SG: I think that's where technology has kind of entered the game — that thing of where we're seeing these things on small devices and thinking that's enough. It's kind of great that someone like Misty Copeland has done what she has, but that was down to technology and how it was able to spread to the world.

I remember there was also a time in Germany where the concept of the fairy tale ballet was all of a sudden rearing its ugly head — major national ballet companies performing The Little Mermaid, because they thought that was going to bring a new audience in…  

But the reason we keep coming back to the greats is because they're loaded  with difficulty, and with the realisation that when you see them, you're seeing the best. While with contemporary dance culture, you don’t know. It hasn't been proven by the test of time.  

JW: And that's the trick, for the avant-garde to be pushing things forward. But at the same time, I guess the reason something has lasted four or five hundred years is because there's depth and beauty there of a kind that stands very much in contrast to a three-minute song.  

SG: Well, when you make a piece, I guess you do hope it's going to be performed for a hundred years.

JW: Do you still have professional dreams? You've spoken about the freedom to just be, and allow ideas to come to you, but are there things that you inherently want to accomplish in your career that remain unfinished business, or a continuation of things that you've loved previously?

SG: For me, ambition is a series of doors that I go through. 

Towards the closing of the ballet when everyone was kind of trying to figure out what their next steps were gonna be, one colleague said “Gosh Stephen, I wish I would have been paying more attention to you, when you were orchestrating all of this” and it felt like the deepest cut ever, because he made it sound real conniving, and it was the complete opposite. Half of the time I didn't know what was going on.

My quest  for the future is still very much like that. For whatever reason, opportunities present themselves to me. But I often think that I've already determined what that opportunity is going to be before I even get there. And then I find my way to it, but it's already there, like in that The Clark Sisters' song that says, “Before you see it, you got to see it or you'll never see it.  

It's a series of doors, it really is; that's how at this moment I view myself – moving forward and I'm going through them. I have choices, but the choice is determined by instinct, you know? So I don't necessarily feel the need to shift course all of a sudden. That's not to say that I am not a disciple of strategy. I am, but the concept of strategy for me is a much more metaphysical type of understanding than it is about ‘do this to get there’. It's a bit different. 

JW: Do you view your art as a form of spiritual practice? 

SG: 100%! There is a certain element of selfish spirituality which I find exciting that pushes me.  I am constantly reminded of how lucky I've been. For me, being spiritual is also about being quiet, being able to listen. When you're able to listen, you can be spiritual. It's a kind of interwoven tapestry.

I'll never forget, I was watching some awards show – like the BET Awards or the Source Awards – where everyone who won an award thanked God and then the audience applauded. And still to this day, I find it interesting, that idea of removing the self from the reason why you're there and putting it in the hands of someone else. Because very often, when it comes to winning awards and being in that type of a profession, you want to think you’re there because you deserve it, and put the work in. But to give yourself to God in that sense while you're receiving the accolades among your peers, is funny. 

And seeing that made me wonder — are they doing that because they don't feel that they could have done it themselves? And I'm thinking, well, it's possible to do both. I don't want to be the one who's going to be spiritually happy that I've been able to do the thing on my own without necessarily making a choice, or about where my gifts or awareness come from. I'm going to claim it as mine, but I'm also going to allow it to be part of something else, you know?

JW: That's a beautiful answer. 

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