Endangered Species, created for the Cape Farewell exhibition The Art of Climate Change will tour internationally with the exhibition throughout 2008. The first event in this series opens in Madrid in January.
Siobhan Davies went on the third Cape Farewell voyage in March 2005. Accustomed through her profession to using her body expressively, she found expression in the sub-zero temperatures of the High Arctic severely limited in nature and range. Her attention centred on her bones, skin, breath; the fragility of her material body versus the effort and basic purpose behind her every movement.
Back home in London Davies quickly formed the idea for a work that would embody some of the primal emotions and rational thoughts the journey had evoked for her. Working with fashion designer Jonathan Saunders, she created a projection, Endangered Species, in which a small, semi-human figure dances gracefully inside a museum display case, her movements exaggerated by a costume of long bending rods that increase in number as her dance progresses. While at first they liberate her by extending the boundaries of her body, the many rods eventually restrict and finally extinguish her small life form.
Davies drew on a distinctive passage from one of her dance company’s recent major works, Plants & Ghosts, in which dancer Sarah Warsop had started from a single simple movement, replicating it through a choreographic process evoking cellular growth. In Endangered Species, the development from movement to phrase to dance passage quite quickly brought in the need for simple props, light flexible rods with which the diminutive figure extends her ability to reach out in all directions. With its ever-increasing adornment and subsequent restrictions on expression, the dance points to how increased consumption alongside so-called technological ‘advancement’ is fast becoming more of a hindrance, rather than a help, to the development of our species. The figure put on show in a glass vitrine, re-emphasises the fragility of the dancing form and the need to preserve it. It is presented here as a specimen, a rarity; a branch of the genus Homo sapiens that has either died out or is yet to evolve.
Endangered Species was first shown in the large-scale Cape Farewell exhibition, The Ship: The Art of Climate Change at the Natural History Museum. Shown in the museum's Jerwood Gallery, The Ship offered a unique insight into the experiences of artists who had travelled to the High Arctic with Cape Farewell.
The work has also been shown at the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool Cathedral, The Place and most recently at the Oxford Playhouse.
Visit the Cape Farewell website to find out more about the original exhibition at the Natural History Museum and the upcoming international tour of Cape Farewell: Art and Climate Change.
