Lloyd Newson led the company as choreographer and artistic director from its inception, apart from the production My Sex, Our Dance (1986), which was co-created and performed with Nigel Charnock.
[3] The first work Newson produced with the new company was made in partnership with Nigel Charnock, and was titled My Sex, Our Dance (1986); it tackled the emergence of AIDS and investigated the idea of trust, both emotionally and physically, between two gay men.
[4] This was followed by Deep End (1987), in which dancer Liz Ranken joined Newson, Richecoeur and Charnock as a performer, and Elemen T(H)ree Sex (1987): works which focused on heterosexual relationships.
All three works toured the UK,[5][6] and My Sex, Our Dance and Deep End were also performed in New York as part of the Next Wave Festival (held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) in 1988.
[10] In 1990, film-director David Hinton, commissioned by the South Bank Show (ITV), collaborated with Newson to adapt the stage production for television.
After Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, Newson began to develop a more poetic style, involving increasingly complex sets.
Again, it was a critical success:[11] the stage production won the London Dance & Performance Award (1992)[12] and was adapted for a BBC film the same year, later winning the company’s first Prix Italia.
In 2004, the work was adapted into an award winning film,[16] directed by Newson, and reworked with extra scenes as a site-specific production, Living Costs (2003), commissioned by and for London’s Tate Modern contemporary art gallery.
To create the script, 85 people of varying ethnicities and sexuality were interviewed by Newson and his researcher, Anshu Rastogi, about their experiences and views concerning religion, culture and homosexuality.
[22] A new production of Enter Achilles, created by Newson and co-produced with Ballet Rambert and Sadler's Wells, staged its world premiere at the Adelaide Festival in March 2020.
[23][24] DV8's work is characterised by a desire to take risks, to question people's attitudes and beliefs, to dissolve barriers that separate art forms, and ultimately to communicate ideas and feelings clearly and unpretentiously.