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For the last two years there's been a major player absent from the British dance scene: Siobhan Davies has taken a breathing space from the constant round of touring. Last year her Bank 2001 project gave established dancers the time and space to work on the recreation of one of her works; this year she's returned to choreography to create a new piece, Plants and Ghosts, due for its première in September. It won't be seen in the usual touring venues, though: it's specifically designed for performance in non-dance locations. So an aircraft hangar outside Oxford, a church in Oslo, and the amazing Salt's Mill near Bradford will be among the places where audiences will be able to get a close up and unusual view.

I was able to get an even closer-up look during a rehearsal in April, at a time when the piece was still incomplete: I luckily chose the day when the company was doing a run through of the two opening sections for the first time. Davies has found a temporary home at the RAD studios in Battersea, where she and her eight dancers were joined by sound sculptor Max Eastley, who was timing the dancing with a stop watch to help in the preparation of his score. He told me that, in order to find the appropriate sounds, he starts from a visual image: "I need to find a place I can inhabit". His work for the first section is almost finished, but the second part is still to be developed, and as he watches, his ideas change.

Davies always starts her dances with a tiny kernel of an idea, out of which she and her dancers develop a way of moving, and a vocabulary, which will be particular to this work. The audience doesn't need to know what the original concept was, though, and I watched the dancers with no inside information on what the piece was about - at that stage it didn't even have a title. What astonished me first of all was the very strong emotional feeling that came across, even when I was sitting close enough to have reached out and touched the dancers, and to see every detail of how hard they were working. In the first section, for instance, there's a very long (nearly seven minutes) solo part for Henry Montes - for most of which he's kneeling or lying on the stage - which to me had such an air of sadness, unhappiness, that it was almost unbearable to watch. The sound from Eastley's tape mingled with faint echoes of a piano from another studio, and it seemed to create a world out of normal time. The rest of this section is full of complex walking patterns, as the dancers dodge, jitter and chase round each other, broken by moments of sudden stillness; it ends quietly with one of the women lying alone on the floor.

Siobhan Davies and Sarah Warsop
photograph by © Nick White

The second section was much less complete, and there were a lot more 'Sorry's' and whispered discussion amongst the dancers. It's here that it is most clear that some decisions are left to the dancers at the moment of performance - within the overall outline they're free to decide, for instance, whether to dance particular sections as duets or as trios, and afterwards Davies asks them why they made those particular choices. The passage I most remember had one of the men - Paul Old, I think - encountering two or three others and trying to establish contact with them - blindly, like a baby, almost sniffing them as he looks for recognition.

Finally Davies worked with just a couple of the dancers on a new section, which incorporated six-foot metal poles. As the dancers tried different moves, Davies would make suggestions, decide which was the better of alternative approaches, call out 'Wait!' to build in moments of stillness. 'If Deborah did this, would there be something you could do?' 'Not too much architecture - keep it fluid!' (Though the architecture was in fact ravishing, especially when she took one of the poles herself - her own angular, elegant body falls into shapes that made me long for a camera.) And in the end, out of it comes a sequence of apparently spontaneous beauty: and that's choreography.

There was still more than a month of the rehearsal period left and a lot of work to be done - they hadn't yet started the bit where some of the dancers walk on stilts - and it's possible, I suppose, that some of the sequences I saw won't make it to the final version. But I can't wait to see the finished piece.