Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

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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……
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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?

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.
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