Diane Parkes speaks to a choreographer who has used the life of Caravaggio as inspiration for his new dance show.

It has taken choreographer Darshan Singh Bhuller nearly five years to bring his latest creation to fruition, but his new show Caravaggio: Exile and Death arrives at Birmingham’s Patrick Centre next week.

Darshan’a last visit to the city’s DanceXchange was as artistic director of Phoenix Dance Theatre when the company was touring with Planted Seeds. Stark, shocking and yet deeply empathetic, Planted Seeds took the audience into the heart of the Bosnian conflict where women’s bodies were used as tools of conquest.

But in 2006, the choreographer decided to strike out on his own, leaving Phoenix – which has had its advantages and its challenges.

“It has been good in that it has given me the opportunity to explore different ideas and to pursue other projects,” he says. “It has made me think more creatively and there are some things I can do now which I couldn’t have done before.

“But it has also been very difficult because I no longer have that machinery around me. It is just my wife and I and that makes it a lot more difficult to put funding in place.

‘‘Funding for this show was actually turned down twice by the Arts Council before I was able to go ahead with it.”

One of the opportunities Darshan took up was a course in film studies – which provided the initial inspiration for his latest work.

“I had done quite a bit of film work before but I had never studied it,” he says. “It was during that period that a lot of my lecturers were mentioning Caravaggio and his effect on film makers.

“Subconsciously I had always liked and been interested in his work but I was now seeing the huge effect he had on modern film making.”

And so Darshan began to learn more about Caravaggio, the Italian artist whose stark realism shocked patrons, the church and the public. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries Caravaggio was commissioned by church leaders and commercial figures to paint subjects as diverse as St John the Baptist, Bacchus, The Entombment of Christ and Mary Magdalene. But his determination to paint these stories as he saw them and his riotous lifestyle led to exile and a young death.

“I started with his paintings but then looked at his life and was quite surprised to learn that he had such a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. His relationships with the Catholic Church and the people he met were very complicated. He surrounded himself with these guys who were very violent.”