Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

This feeling is not unfamiliar to me: I am in a studio working on my own. What am I doing? Why am  working on the same things over again? (or not working on them?). Isn’t this just a waste of time? The way I ‘comfort’ myself in this situation is to recognise that occasionally something interesting surfaces (or ‘bubbles up’ as Deborah has put it). I also remind myself that people in other art forms have a similar process – some writers sit at a desk to work for a specific period of time every day, and they may only write a few words one day, and then a chapter the next.

Sometimes generating material comes very easily, sometimes it’s so hard. I find I can be so reluctant to ‘develop’ material – I think that at times changing the first way I conceived a movement seems like I’m admitting it’s ‘wrong’!

Working in pairs and groups helped. Performing in a pair, or in a situation where I was being witnessed, ‘tested’ the clarity of the movements I had been working on. It also gave me the energy to push them further, or find something new about them to explore.

Having completed the 2nd week of Bank, I now find myself in a place that requires a big jump into the dark. I am clearer in understanding what I need to do, or rather what I need to try and aviod doing from habit, to generate something ‘new’ out of myself and my process. The knowing is pretty clear – it’s the doing something about it that is proving quite a challenge.
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Each person now has a collection of elements which capture different aspects of their portrait. We started to look at a way of structuring these elements . We followed on from the idea of using the songs as a way to challenge us in how these elements sit alongside each other, but this time we replaced the song score with text. They all found a different piece of text and no matter whether it was prose poetry or a section of a play each one had a play on repetition and rythmn. They were all set the task to create their own set of rules or code to adhere to and then feed their fragments into this new structure. This became the first layer to work from and once the memory worked its way around this jigsaw they would be able to sense what new layer of thought or added code could develop it further. Showing each other and working their material in group plays was an important part of this process.

This last few days of the week as being quite hard or better everything felt quite dense: too thick to be able to swim through it without getting stuck. The solo brief was given on tuesday and since then we have start our individual search through the infinite world of movement  or functional movements where everything its possible as long as it has a clear intention or reason. The task it’s so free that it is scary to start.I have been through a lots of personal doubt of how and why chose a particular movement, what is about it that is important and needs to be focus on to,…is it too little ,…..too much? …too banal?…too gestural ..just not good enough?I am trying to ignore the destructive mantra and notice what stays in my body memory as I keep working and also follow what I am curious about.I am not very objective about myself at this stage but I can see in everybody else a real transformation in the moment where the body as a whole convey something and it is very fascinating to watch. Jill classes as been such a great contribution to the afternoon work as they prepare the body through an imaginative process of exploration of set material , improvisation and partnering work…..cannot believe it’s the end of week 2.

Thank you for all your responses to the previous questions. Here is another!
Is the project revealing anything to you about your history and the things that you have learned through your dance career and education? Has anything surprised you?

Today I have tried to explore further the possibility of a single thought looking at   it from a variety of points of view.I worked first with a extract of a text focusing my attention on different words each time and then on a picture with  I have worked on a different texture and muscular density.

Susan Hitch
Linguist and Broadcaster
As an academic, Susan has written on Alfred the Great’s ninth century programme of translating important books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon English, and on women’s writing in the Renaissance. But her curiosity about languages and how language itself works goes back further in her own life, to a childhood in Japan, Cuba, Greece and Germany, travelling between places and between language; later she lived in Algeria, Brazil and Poland.
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A new question for week 4:
As well as the work in the studio you have had the opportunity to take part in classes and discussions? What new insights (if any) have these given you into movement and process?

I’m not sure if ‘completedness’ is a word in the proper sense but I seem to be concerning myself quite a lot with it. Maybe ‘completion’ is more the word I’m looking for.
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