Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

Jerwood Bank 2008 ran from 20th October to 28th November with six experienced dancers: Lyndsey McConville, Freddie Opoku-Addaie, Joe Moran, Luisa D’Ambrosio, Sarah Dowling and Josephine Dyer. Over the course of the six weeks each of the dancers worked with Siobhan Davies Dancers exploring section from the company work, Two Quartets (2007), focusing on developing a ‘portrait’. By providing time, space and support the project aims to enable participants to challenge ingrained habits and discover new methods of initiating, creating and developing movement material.

This year’s project was led by Siobhan Davies Dancer Deborah Saxon with support from Sarah Warsop, Henry Montes and Gill Clarke, with additional input from Siobhan Davies. Two professionals from other disciplines who had worked with the company previously came in to talk to the participants: Jonathan Cole (a neurophysiologist) and Susan Hitch (a linguist). The speakers provided alternative viewpoints on communication and movement, and therefore additional resources for the participants in their own creative work.

Watch the project as it developed, navigate by weeks or dancer, or view the image and video documentation.

The Jerwood Bank Project was originally created through Siobhan Davies’ interest in the creative development of ‘mid-career’ dance artists looking to shift their practice to a new level. Watch a short introduction to the Jerwood Bank Project from Siobhan Davies.
Duration: 2 minutes.

We started with breath.

They were asked to write a thought about breath (it could be a singular word or a sentence) which could stem from any impetus…. anatomical, emotional, situational ect.They passed this thought on to another person and this new thought became the engine for an exploration (about 20min) all the while keeping a part of themselves alert to moments that spark their curiosity and which could lead to further exploration. They recorded these moments in their own notebooks.

They were then asked to add a new thought on breath to the one they received….it could be a continuation of the previous thought or taking it on a new tangent. This was then passed on to another person in the group and the process was repeated, hopefully continuing to challenge their way of thinking.

We repeated this process three times and then the page was passed back to the original person.

Everyone then went back to their notebooks and chose one of their new thoughts to explore further. They worked on their own, in pairs with one observing and in group improvisations. Slowly more clarity of the thought was experienced and demonstrated and as they continued everyone became more precise about the intention which drove the movement.

Project Leader
Deborah Saxon was born in Australia and worked for numerous dance and theatre companies before travelling to the UK in 1990. She joined Siobhan Davies Dance in 1991. During the last 12 years she has also performed with Mark Baldwin Dance Company, Jeremy James Company and Xoreftes in Athens. More recently she has created two duets with Henry Montes Uncouple and Humming Solos. Deborah is a freelance teacher teaching open classes and workshops throughout Europe and Australia.
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Support artist for the project
Sarah Warsop is an artist, choreographer and dancer based in London. She joined Siobhan Davies Dance in 1997 and has been part of the creative development and performance of Siobhan Davies’ works of the past twelve years, touring the UK, US and Europe. She began her choreographic career while a dancer with Rambert Dance Company, where she worked with choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Richard Alston and Christopher Bruce. Her solo Small Hours toured as part of the Rambert repertoire in Britain and China. Sarah’s choreographic works have also been presented through her company, Snag Dance Project. Over the past decade, Sarah has created and performed ten major dance works with the company, for venues as diverse as Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Royal Opera House and the Wales Millennium Centre, regularly collaborating with composers, DJs, dancers and visual artists.
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Support artist for the project
Henry Montes is a freelance dance maker, performer and teacher. Henry joined Siobhan Davies Dance in 1998 and was awarded the 2003 Critics Circle National Dance Award for Outstanding Male Artist for his performance in Siobhan Davies’ Plants and Ghosts. He has also performed for many independent choreographers and companies in New York and Europe including Susanne Linke Company, Tanztheater Reinhild Hoffmann, Keely Garfield, Kirstie Simson, KJ Holmes, Gaby Agis, Charles Linehan, Rosemary Butcher and Jonathan Burrows Group.
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Support artist for the project
Gill is an Independent Dance Artist performer, teacher, choreographer/director and advocate. A founder member of the Siobhan Davies Dance Company she was recipient of a London Dance and Performance Award. As a freelance performer she has worked with other choreographers and companies including Janet Smith, Rosemary Butcher, Rosemary Lee. Recent projects have included directing site-specific movement installations, collaborating with composers and choreographing for the Gandini Juggling Project. She has an international reputation as a teacher of professionals and companies and frequently leads and facilitates debates and professional development opportunities for Independent Dance.
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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? 

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.

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?

Susan Hitch
Linguist and Broadcaster
As an academic, Susan has written on Alfred the Great’s ninth century programme of translating important books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon English, and on women’s writing in the Renaissance. But her curiosity about languages and how language itself works goes back further in her own life, to a childhood in Japan, Cuba, Greece and Germany, travelling between places and between language; later she lived in Algeria, Brazil and Poland.
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A new question for week 4:
As well as the work in the studio you have had the opportunity to take part in classes and discussions? What new insights (if any) have these given you into movement and process?

To show a journey across the space moving through three distinct terrains. Within the task we will look at how an imagined terrain or circumstance makes an impact or imprint on our movement language. Each terrain should have its own unique rhythm and timing and we should be able to drop into each state without build up or preparation. This will contrast our process for the portraits task in which we found an internal emotional world that impacted on the space around and was particularly directed to a known viewer.