Making Dreamers come true
Dreamers creator, writer and executive producer Lisa Holdsworth explains how she found the balance between drama and authenticity in this Channel 4 drama about a group of dance students.
Dreamers follows an eclectic group of dance students as they navigate the intense highs and lows of coming of age in today’s complex world – captured through stories that are as joyful and funny as they are raw and truthful, brought viscerally to life via irresistible dance choreography.
The show, produced by Duck Soup Films for Channel 4 and distributed by All3Media International, tells the story of the Chapeltown Collective dance troupe and their journey to the most important dance showcase of their young lives. But it’s also a drama about the things young people really care about: friendship, family and having the chance to express themselves. Its stories and characters are a product of a unique and immersive development process that I believe gave the show a unique and authentic voice.
There is an industry theory about writing teenagers. The maxim is that US TV portrays young characters as they see themselves: wise beyond their years, emotionally intelligent and on the cusp of manifest destiny. Meanwhile, UK TV writes teenagers as adults see them: stroppy and annoying – the suggestion being that American writers treat their teens as young adults while UK writers treat them like kids.
I don’t think that’s strictly true, and UK shows like Skins, Sex Education and Heartstopper have given us rounded characters with rich inner emotional lives. And that sophistication has been reflected in their success. With that in mind, the producers of Dreamers and I were eager not to alienate our target audience. We decided we needed to actually talk to that audience. As it turned out, our timing was impeccable, as we were talking to young people at one of the most disruptive times of their lives.
In 2019, we gave a shout-out to anybody aged between 16 and 20 interested in dancing and getting involved in the creative industries. We made it clear that we didn’t care about body shape, heritage, class, gender or what kind of dancing they enjoyed. All we asked was that they submit a short video telling us about themselves.
The response was glorious. Young people seized the opportunity to show us who they were. We had kids who lived all their lives in small villages, city kids and young people who had arrived in the UK via multiple countries as refugees. We had videos from kids who identified as neurodivergent, non-binary and queer. We saw teenagers who were Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh and Christian.
Still, they all had one thing in common: they loved to dance, whether that be street, contemporary, afrobeats, ballet, tap, ballroom, pole-dancing or bhangra. And at all different skill levels from prima ballerina to TikTok bedroom dancer. We even had figure skaters and amateur wrestlers. All life was here.
The plan was to get them in a room together and give them the chance to talk. However, a little virus called Covid-19 put paid to that.
So we did what everyone else was doing and went online. For a couple of months, we held our Saturday morning Zooms with young people joining us from their bedrooms, kitchens and gardens. We set small creative tasks like creating their ideal characters for the show, improvising arguments between those characters and coming up with outlandish scenarios those characters might find themselves in.
We also talked a lot about how they felt their generation was being portrayed on TV. And they didn’t hold back in ridiculing some of the tropes and stereotypes they had been saddled with. They were tired of seeing young characters make stupid decisions about drugs, relationships and sex. They hated characters who were nihilistic and hopeless.
Because, even in the face of a global pandemic, our kids were ambitious and aspirational.
But perhaps not in the way we might think. They didn’t necessarily aspire to being rich and famous. Many of them just wanted security, good friends and to express themselves creatively – completely at odds with the prevailing view of young people as shallow, terminally online drones with arrested attention spans. Indeed, they shared their fears about a world consumed by deepfakes and influencers.
I really hope those young people found as much lockdown joy in those Saturday morning sessions as I did. And once they were over, we made a commitment to keep in touch with our cohort with further opportunities for them to come together for quizzes, movie nights and other, regrettably online, activities. We were determined to keep the conversation going.
With their voices still ringing in our ears, we went away to create the characters for Dreamers, giving them goals and obstacles that felt true to those Saturday sessions.
At the heart of our drama, we placed a young woman struggling with anxiety while dealing with an alcoholic mum. We also gave her a ruthlessly ambitious best friend who feels misunderstood and alienated from his family, and an alpha-male love interest whose cockiness belies his chaotic home life and soft heart. Puppy, Koby and Liam came to us rich and complex thanks to the workshops.
Character development continued once we embarked on our open auditions, during which we saw more than 800 young people eager to be part of the Chapeltown Collective, including several of our workshop attendees. Again, we were eager for the process to be a chance for them to show us who they were. Auditionees were given a chance to improvise, talk and dance in the creative atmosphere generated by casting director Shaheen Baig and her team. It became clear that I needed to reflect the personalities and voices of this unaffected, raw talent in the scripts.
Once we had found our collective, they worked intensively with director Sara Dunlop improvising around the storylines. Notes would come down from the rehearsal room suggesting dialogue which was often incorporated into the scripts. Then once we were on set, our actors were encouraged to learn their lines but still feel empowered to put their own spin on the dialogue, with opportunities for improvisation built into the shoot.
When writing young characters, a writer’s biggest fear is they’ll create risible, out-of-touch dialogue. The more you try to be ‘down with the kids,’ the worse it gets. But through this process, we found a balance between drama and authenticity that makes me very proud of our Dreamers.
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tagged in: All3Media International, Channel 4, Dreamers, Duck Soup Films, Lisa Holdsworth