Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

Who’d have thought 8 little bars of a song could cause so much consternation.  8 moves were fitted randomly above notes in the above song. Squeezing a move in to a time slot half a beat long was testing – it tested ‘the move’ in particular the initiation point of the move – clarify that and you were laughing – well kind of ……………..add a real sense of its relationship to breath – ie. explosive, sighing, inbreath… and then you had something solid to hold on to as the song insists its way on……
Read more >

The idea that each person creating a portrait was introduced to the group. This was the starting point for the making of the second quartet of the work Two Quartets. There were a number of things discussed in relation to the task.

-Try not to have a preconceived idea or image of who the portrait would be of. This is so we can discover this person through a gradual building of fragments of material, drawn from a range of sources including everyday, emotional, textual and visual stimuli.

-Through the testing of our material in different ways we will start to develop layers of information to draw upon as the process evolves.

-To be aware that the solo is to be directly communicated to a viewer. That this becomes a constant reference point.

To follow on from what we talked about in the group discussion:
What discoveries are you making about your own process?
Is working alongside other people in the studio giving you new insights? 

The task seems daunting, but exciting.

Finding ‘everyday’ moves at times feels exposing. Also a worry about being too ‘mimetic’ – explore this or discard?

I am feeling intimidated by the freedom of the task.

I can feel inside crying out ‘tell me what to do!’

However I am resisting the urge to storm into the task – as I often do. I am trying to create some space for thoughts and ideas to emerge. Let’s hope they do..

Create some everyday actions………….I can’t think past gestures – I want to think past gestures and mimed actions -

Smile ( that’s the only one I have)

Create movement from sensation or memory or……….I can’t move past image – this is a major problem for me in creating dance material I get stuck in images – still pictures – that dont seem to need to move – but I do need to move – I want to create movement that moves not just images that breathe. My Song movement material too – it hardly moved it couldnt get off the spot – I think I want the intiation to be so strong that thats all I’m concentrating on not where the initiation can take me to……………………

I have heard and used the word portraits so many times and yet not thought about its meaning enough. I naturally associate it with a representation of a characteristic feature which refer to a person more or less recognizable in the photographic sense but necessary significant about the subject and his nature. The brief is to embody the story which our movements contains through a juxtaposition or layering of moves, textures and structure in order to convey the multiple world that our living body experience: a simultaneous sense of memory, present and future….. I am simplifying greatly what was said but… I need to do this right now.Its a great task and facinating idea…. as much as greatly scary.

I would like to spend my time in the studio doing as much as possible to try to find movements without worrying about  if they’re right… too much… I think it is the only way. I believe there is a sort of natural selection phenomena with movements for which the good one styes and the other disappear in the oblivious. I would like to take inspiration from people and their gesturesin order to get away from the feeling that I am miming an action. Well this is step one.

There is a sense of isolation in the process. I am excited by the prospect of using the methods we’ve been exploring, particularly looking forward to creating a structure. At the moment, however, I am feeling challenged in finding ways to generate movement. I am getting caught in questioning what’s going to work, what’s particular, what’s specific or what’s too self-expressive. I am playing with new ways to discover material and for that reason am feeling a little disconnected or removed from myself/ my practice.

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.
Read more >

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?