Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

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.

 Tags: 2. Week two/ Josephine Dyer