My brother Nigel Warrack, a musician, artist and dancer, who has died aged 59 after a stroke, founded the Flying Gorillas dance company, which travelled the world teaching and performing for children and local communities.
The son of Catkin (nee Cowley) and her husband, the musicologist John Warrack, Nigel was born in London, where he grew up in Notting Hill surrounded by artists, writers and musicians. He studied at Bryanston school, Dorset, and then the London Contemporary Dance School before working as a professional dancer throughout the 1980s as a member of various companies, including Ra Ra Zoo, while also teaching dance at the University of Middlesex.
In 1994 he met Susana Garcia, a fellow dancer, while they were both studying on the Gulbenkian course for composers and choreographers at Bretton Hall, West Yorkshire. They married and settled in Notting Hill, where they had a son, Lorenzo. Susana and Nigel formed the Flying Gorillas company in 2001, working with musicians and dancers from a huge range of backgrounds and traditions. They toured theatres, village halls, schools, prisons, care homes and hospices, and worked with Gypsy and Roma communities, as well as with low-income groups.
With support from the EU’s cultural programmes, the company worked with the Guarani tribe in Argentina, the Bedouin of Jordan, the Sámi of Lapland, with villagers in Bali and Kerala, and with Syrian refugees in Turkey.
The company integrated musical styles and instrumentation from these travels into their performances as they toured. They might stay for a week in a village, running workshops with children from the local school, building to a performance with a last act led by the children. These were joyous and often riotous spectacles.
An accomplished instrumentalist, Nigel played the oboe and the piano, but also the full range of saxophones, the digeridoo, the theremin and the saw. His most remarkable talent, however, was his ability to share his enthusiasm for music and dance with disparate groups of people.
Just days after the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, a few streets from Nigel’s home, he led breakdance workshops for the children of affected families. On the day of his death he was in Kerala, on a tour of south India, and had led a dance workshop in the morning.
He is survived by Susana, Lorenzo, his father and five siblings.
