Mission
Siobhan Davies Dance and Studios celebrate, value and seek to strengthen the role of choreography, dance and dance artists within contemporary culture. Siobhan Davies Dance and Siobhan Davies Studios devise situations in which dance is recognised as a physical model of thought one that can be experienced in the moment of its doing and that its choreographic information becomes part of a lasting and transferable knowledge, benefiting practices beyond dance.
Siobhan Davies develops her own creative practice alongside chosen dance artists, and further extends its reach through the life of Siobhan Davies Dance pushing forward and testing ways in which dance particularly communicates the complexity of human thought, feeling as well as a relationship to others and to place. Imbued with a strong and focused sense of partnership, Siobhan Davies’ practice grows in a variety of mediums and formats, seeking to engage audiences and to stimulate an understanding about choreography and dance and their contribution to the on-going reconfiguration of ideas, practice and performance within and beyond the arts.
Siobhan Davies’ Artistic statement
I am an artist, I choreograph, I collaborate closely with dance and other artists. I enjoy the engagement our work has with an audience. As a maker in the studio, I crash about, building, dismantling and trying to find my relationship with movement.
I wish to evolve my practice and the communicating of it so that the work can contribute to movement being further recognised as an equal and distinct medium alongside the other arts: a medium in which thought, feeling and action are all contributors to the process of making, are able to be visible in the moving body.By the time of performance, the movement has an immediacy, is a state of being not a representation of it. The dancers and the movements that they make are the stuff of the performance and become another kind of evidence about who and what we are.
We are all conceived to move and throughout our lives each of us uses a far greater range of movement than we acknowledge. I wish to develop a shared understanding with an audience about the choices that dance artists can make. These range from the movements we can all identify with to those which have been transformed by embodying an idea or imaginative state, or transformed by choreographic or compositional structures and patterns. I don't wish to pre-prescribe a dance language but instead attempt to find the right movement for a particular moment. These choices help all of us to become more sensitised and open to what movement is capable of.
