Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

I studied Modern Languages at Bristol University before training in dance at Northern School of Contemporary Dance (1996-97). I continued my movement training through numerous classes and workshops in the UK and abroad. I have danced for choreographer Caroline Salem, and in my own choreography (A Tin Drum, Viva la Vida, Threefold and dream knit).
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I don’t have time to write much, so a few thoughts:
I noticed on Day 2 that the focus on breath was causing me to prioritise the beginning and end of a movement, perhaps blurring the juicy, important journey between. I managed to break out of this a bit yesterday…
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The task seems daunting, but exciting.

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

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.

Duration:1:30

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: 2:47

Duration: 2:18