Sarah Frater, 3rd May 2006
Uplit clouds against a dusking sky were the backdrop for Siobhan Davies’s piece that premiered last night at her just-opened dance space in Southwark. The glazing in the undulating ribbon roof revealed London’s billowing skyscape, a sight that somehow evoked the smell of the sea.
It made sense because Davies’s choreography often seems less like motion than an aroma, a sensory trigger that evokes a memory on whose swell you’re looped back to the present. ‘I’m just proud to be in this building,’ said Davies, grinning ear to ear, as were her eight dancers, most long-term collaborators, who performed with an anonymity and grace that we see in all Davies’s uncompromisingly abstract work.
The Sarah Wigglesworth-designed building is a stylish restoration/new-build hybrid. The 50-minute piece, In Plain Clothes, is performed in the wood-lined, roof-level studio. The costumes are a tad drab (perhaps intentionally), and the spoken/played score a little gnomic, but the choreography is quality.
It begins with the dancers walking from side to side, like a flotilla of little boats. They deliver and collect each other on each pass, with scenes of ever-elaborating choreography between each delivery and collection. Some have a maritime hue, others are a motion-mystery. All has a quiet magic that’s partly the building, partly Davies’s accomplished details.
