Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

The idea of testing movement is a bit like passing flour through a sieve: a movement get explored through a range of improvisation to do with  something like expansion, timing, body range, explosion ,pauses and silences,  fragmentation. The choices of the testing has to be relevant to the nature of the exploration and… sometimes after the all trial… thing there is nothing left: complete  emptiness. I found myself in that place a lot of times during the week and started to wondered why  questioning my ability of moving as a whole and (as always) ignoring or having to shut off that voice and start again. In some ‘lucky’ moments that silence has stripped that movement enough to be able to re-dress it with the needed items or for a  new idea to happen. Why is silence so hard for me I don’t know.

We spent part of this week working on crossing the space, in tasks which drew us away from the more stationary/frontal/inward space of the portraits.

There were a couple of afternoons where I don’t think anyone was quite sure what they were doing: was the most important thing to travel; to imagine a moving light; or to create a tension in space between us and the moving light?

It became clearer when the task became to find three very distinctive ‘terrains’ to move through. What was interesting was how we all approached the task. Everyone seemed to realise that they needed to find a “way in”, a way of narrowing the task for themselves, and everyone’s approach was slightly different. There was also a real sense for me that even at times of confusion or doubt, everyone seemed to trust that eventually they would work something out, that the task was worth trying and would be in some way beneficial.

Of course it was. Eventually we found terrains to travel though and when we returned to our portraits they were enriched and somehow more ‘open’.

Duration: 1:57