Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

I came  to dance through quite a convoluted route: design was my staring point and then I took a detour through gestural theatre and  set design during which  dance  become my main focus and  stayed as such as my life resettled in London. My work moves between dancing,  teaching , making my own work,  collaborating with other  choreographers and movement directing for theatre. Design had a very strong impact on my work as a dancer – I perceive the body as a tracing and carving tool for the space and the sequencing  of this is what releases  the emotions and colours  of what we want to portray.

  I become interested in the ‘Bank project’ because it is a unique opportunity to  study and learn about a method of composition with the focus on oneself  and the process, rather than the deadline of   a production schedule.I have followed the work of SDDC for many years and the element which i love the most about it is the movement language and how it traces and relates to the space and the sound score.I would like to learn about  the art of making  movement, learning new skills and methods  to support my work as a dancer and maker.I also want to have an opportunity to play  in the  studio and discover what I want to work with and see what inspires my imagination.I am very excited and quite nervous about it and very much looking forward to start.

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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.

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.

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.

Duration: 3:02

Yesterday we had our second sharing of the work and It was a very useful and a bit easyer experience than the one on week 4.During a talk with Ian we discussed the importance and relevance of showing the work during a period of research and the inevitable feeling of….. there is a show today …I have better get it right or …I am not there yet …or I haven’t got enough ….which seems a automatic reflex that the mind does in situation like this one.Despite the ongoing ‘mantra’ I  believe in the importance of showing the work  as a necessary form of study  of a language which cannot being taken away from the presence of the audience to define its shape form and intensity.I noticed that the texture of what I was doing needed to be tuned  in relation to a different energy which was preset in the space at the time………mmm a lot to do about that but …that one but….. we have another one to go.The comment where very helpful and the format a much more fluid than the first one…thanks very much to anybody that came.

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.

Duration: 2:10