© Nick White Original Q&A's in Forum - add your thoughts and views Jane Simpson interview Siobhan Davies(07/02) Siobhan Davies reviews Siobhan Davies Dance Company website

On the eve of the company's opening at Sadler's Wells, in September 2005, Siobhan Davies gave a wonderfully full response to Ballet.co readers written questions. It's a marvelous insight into what makes a choreographer and director 'tick'. Over to Siobhan Davies:

Dear Bruce, thank you for asking me to be a beginner. I think it is an excellent idea and will flourish as a way to keep communication open between all of us that are interested and love dance.

Thank you to all of you for asking interesting questions. I do have difficulty giving short precise answers. There is always a bit more explaining going on in my mind. The more I pull a thread the more it unravels. I would like to give a picture of what I have been doing this week.

I have just been to a conference on climate change involving artists and scientists at Oxford University. It was a remarkable 2 days trying to unwrap how artists may want the issues of climate change to inform or shift their work. I met and listened to some very clear, passionate, humorous and worried scientists as well as curious, enquiring artists. Now I am on a train to Gatwick and on to Philadelphia where the company (SDDC) is performing. I am only writing this so that you can imagine my travelling life at the moment, and a couple of reasons why answers won't be lengthy - again, thank you to you all and now I shall try my best.

Secondly, the video trailer on the Sadler's Wells website looks good. Evidently the whole work has been filmed. Might this be made available on DVD?"

Answer: The majority of the performances have been in the 'square'. Four have not been - Skopje in Macedonia, Salisbury Playhouse, Cambridge Arts Theatre, and Sadler’s Wells.

The rest have included conventional theatres where we brought the audience up on to the large stage and surrounded the dancers behind the proscenium.

I did make Bird Song to be seen at close quarters. To see the dancers thinking as well as moving, to have a more sensual or visceral experience. I saw the dance and the performers develop as well as the relationship between my dance work and the art work of David Ward grow stronger.

I am now seeing the same work in the proscenium theatre with the audience in the auditorium. The light projections are behind as well as underneath the dancers. It feels like a dynamic moving canvas with the dancers drawing the movement within it. It has a clarity, less intimate, more bold. The dancers are in a different 'country'. It is a real alternative to the first version, a choice for the piece and the dancers to be seen in a different context.

Given that the company's "motto", according to its website, is "Bringing Dance to Different Spaces", I wonder how Ms. Davies sees her artistic vision for the company (and for London Dance in general) developing now that it is soon to have a permanent dance space in Southwark? How does she think it might expand her work and how does she think it might limit it (if at all)?"

Answer: I am not sure that I believe in mottos. Sometimes we need a quick and hopefully precise way of differentiating one tour from another. I was excited to take Plants & Ghosts to 'different spaces'. For me it meant bringing the work, the dancers and the audience into one common space. I hoped that a different audience would feel curious and welcome in a non theatre environment and that a returning audience would enjoy a different sense of performance space.

The new studio in Southwark gives us a chance to have a working home. For the first time the company and its management will be under the same roof and I will be able to make a work in a constant, physically safe and beautiful space. It will be wonderful. While the building was being made I have met so many people outside dance whose ideas and enthusiasm have helped me. I would like to keep the ideas of cross fertilization alive in all the work done in the building after it is open.

Independent Dance and International Workshop Festival will also work there and Southwark may have someone based there to support dance in the borough.

I know I have to carry on learning all the time. I hope that the building with its events, classes, courses and discussions will give those both in and beyond the dance profession, a chance to enjoy continuous learning.

Do they have any impact on you for good or bad?"

Answer: I read the critics after the new piece has had a chance to run in. I sense the practice of criticism in the newspapers is having a hard time. The competition for space is a battle that results in reviews that have been edited to a minimum.

Brief praise or damnation from critics has an immediate impact but to influence me I need a longer discourse. I am quite a fierce self-critic but enjoy keeping a sense of humour. Sometimes it is hard to get something right and I just have to solve some of the problems in the next piece.

Answer: Yes I do Jane.

I begin a piece having a strong sense of how it will live when it is on stage, but how we get there is always, or should be, surprising. I don't want to know too much ahead of time because then the work would remain within my own realm and I try to go beyond that. That is why the early research and rehearsal time is so important. That becomes the base that the work can evolve from. The piece assembles through my direction, the dancers and other collaborators, but also by chance. By the time the audience sees it, they may use any one of these elements to enter into the work. The work has to be robust and clear enough to allow that to happen. What I love the most is that the structures help release an emotion I could not have imagined and while I take full responsibility for the dance, it is alive and separate from me.

Answer: The shock comes when a teacher rings up and tells us that Wyoming is on the syllabus and asks for information and no-one has told us about it. We have now got a CD Rom ready, but if I had been given the chance, I would never have chosen Wyoming. I remain proud of it but the company and I have moved into a different era and feel clearer discussing more recent work. There is no-one in my present company who performed in it, and I am feeling a bit dusty trying to remember worthwhile details. At that time I did not record the process or keep records. However, there it is on the syllabus and there will now be an INSET day at Sadler’s Wells with Paul Douglas, an original Wyoming dancer, to talk about it.

A CD Rom has been made. Sanjoy Roy and Catherine James have pulled together contemporary articles and reviews. Collaborators have been asked to look back at what we did. There is a beautiful film, made in 1988, directed by Peter Mumford.

I think students do come to the work if it or the choreographers are on the syllabus. I would hope if they are studying dance they would go, as much as they could afford, to many dance events.

As far as you are aware, have any steps been taken since that enquiry to implement any of the goals that were discussed? What are your ideas for the Siobhan Davies Dance Company's future in this regard, i.e. what will your input be to the improvement of dance's profile here in the UK, and is there anything further you can do to convince 'the powers that be' of the need to improve dancers' working conditions?"

Answer: I believe Dance UK would have the best and most recent update on what is happening after the select committee. I have already attended a meeting about dance's influence on health. My input for that was to try and convince schools or cities who may build sports centres, to include separate spaces for dance. The sprung floor and acoustics are different than that needed for sport. More purpose built dance studios would be fabulous.

Dancers are the life blood of all choreographers and I am not the only choreographer to want to care for the artists who work for them.

This has always been a passion for me but it is also pragmatic. I like to work with experienced artists. Their knowledge is deep rooted, they remain curious and have good questions about the how, what, where and why of making dances. I enjoy and need those conversations in the studio and I repay the dancers by keeping wages as high as I can, providing good classes and making better pieces. The dancers were the first inspiration for the building.

I think the 'powers that be' do want to improve working conditions. Our job is to keep pushing it up the priority list. We must use every opportunity to highlight how dancers subsidise their profession. This is true of all the arts and probably a fact of life, but I champion dance when I can.

Since having 'The Siobhan Davies Dance Company' on one's CV must be a powerful lure for any dancer, I imagine that you would have a flood of applications for each new place you advertise. Am I right about that?"

Answer: I am very, very aware I have wonderful dancers. I enjoy dancers returning each season because the knowledge learnt through each piece accumulates. Deborah Saxon has been in the company for 13 years, Sarah Warsop for 9 years and Mariusz for only 2. All of us are curious about what we don't know and make each piece as an exploration. The dancers do come from varied backgrounds: Polish, French, Australian, American and English, as well as different trainings: classical, contemporary, aikido, yoga, body-mind centring, release work and improvisation. It is how they use their knowledge that is as important as what that knowledge is. There is no technically perfect way of communicating with movement but I am looking for accuracy to the idea behind the movement. I have a lot more to learn about this.

There has been quite a gradual turnover of dancers so that a lot of auditions have not been necessary. When we have done one, there have been many applicants and some very good dancers, but only had a place for one. Auditions for a good professional dancer can be very numbing and unreal, so we try to conduct them in such a way that each individual can represent themselves genuinely. It is not only their dancing that is important, but what they bring to the rehearsal process. A hard worker with imagination and humour is a great combination.

Reading back through the interviews linked to above, I'm curious about your choreographic process. From guided improvisation, how do you go about completing the choreography - what methods do you use to record, remember, and then re-teach? So much change has been facilitated by the increasing use of technology in the choreographic process - how do you feel this has changed dance in general?"

Answer: I find it very hard to write succinctly about the choreographic process. The necessary editing for this reply leaves out great chunks.

The first thought is to make a good work that allows dance and dancers to express an idea clearly, that no other art could have done this in such a potent and particular way. I try to find a simple beginning that can be expressed by movement but is a rich enough idea that it can evolve in several different directions - through the imagination and enquiry of each dancer. So we work to produce small nuggets of movement, not long drawn out phrases. We have a video camera in the studio and each dancer has their own tape, and they then choose which of their explorations to record. Gradually a series of nuggets gets built up. My job is to give clear instructions to motivate the dancers in the first place and then keep an eye out on how the movement supports the original idea, how it might be spilling into new and more fertile ground and needs pursuing or if it is pulling away from the bone of the original task and not helpful. Over the first 3 weeks to a month, a body of precise movement ideas has built up and we are ready to begin the work. The early rehearsals circle around improvisation and then setting something to make it more accurate but knowing that later on when the subject is well enough known, the dancers can go back to making choices.

When we rehearse work or a new dancer is involved, we go back through the process so that we re find the reasons for doing the material. I need to think about how the choreographic process has been changed by technology beyond my use of the camera. I have been talking to a software and hardware developer - Scott de la Hunter about new tools that can be used in rehearsal. Certainly there are effects that can be introduced to the stage through technological advancement. Sam Collins, my present Production Manager who is also an artist, keeps me informed about developments, and he was instrumental in how we used projections in Bird Song. My primary conversation though, is with the dancers in a studio, using movement.

Many thanks for agreeing to do this; I look forward to reading your replies!"

Answer: 1. I tried to bring as much of my working method into the Royal Ballet as I could without making them feel underpowered. It was a very brief rehearsal period at an extraordinarily hectic time for the dancers. On reflection I should not have done the piece. We all worked hard in the studio. Each one of us wanted to gain from and give to the process but whether it was the pressure of the moment or the use and mix of different movement ideas, I could not reach the place to make the piece. It was absolutely not the dancers fault.

2. No I don't want to pinch a dancer. I love seeing dancers move superbly with the choreographer they have chosen to work with. There are dancers from the past I would love to have seen - Nijinsky for one.

3. Mainly I think dance that was made for a live event does not work well on TV. The elements of distance, space, speed, volume of movement, risk and pattern seem to vanish. Sport does work so I remain confused. Lloyd Newson and David Hinton have made very strong films but I have not. I would love to think of an unpredictable way of putting dance movement on the screen.

As someone else has said, it is a privilege to have this opportunity."

Answer: 1. There is a lot to answer here and I may have to come back to some of this later.

I would like the movement to be articulate about ideas that can be best expressed by the body, a person as the primary source of information. We all are capable of switching from the abstract to the figurative so easily and quickly. To me it makes sense that if dance is the story of the whole body and its history of action, emotion and consciousness, then the language of dance does enjoy making those same switches.

During the 80's I did make pieces that had a more narrative base. Bridge the Distance, Minor Characters, Silent Partners, Wyoming and Different Trains.

Now I think I am closer to what I want to do. To observe the undercurrents of how we think, act and solve problems as a human; then try to find a movement language that is not a translation of an idea, but is the idea in movement. I feel I haven't quite expressed this clearly. I hope the best explanation is in the work.

2. It was an energetic rest. I arrived back able to shed some of my movement history and make room for new information.

3. Yes, the more confident I become in directing the dancers the more they can release movement ideas. I am no longer doing class and they are far more informed about their own bodies and how they wish to use them. They have a subtlety, energy, power and detail of movement that I no longer have. So they can provide me with this fabulous amount of intelligent material. I need to be the initiator, a discerning outside eye, the editor and finally direct the movement into the piece, which is the choreography.

At all points the dancers are contributors and they individually own the work by understanding their own thread through it. It is my work to have a vision and an understanding of the piece to make it a whole.

4. Bank has been revisited.

5. Huge store! Sounds overwhelming. Dance, movement, call it what you will, is in itself an enormous subject. I try to reach one of its many centres in each piece. For the next work I have asked people from other professions to come and talk to us about structures that they work with - a heart surgeon, an artist, composer, landscape artist, architect and an origins of language expert. In turn they look at how we work and we all enjoy being in different circumstances.

They are all articulate and passionate about what they do and have enjoyed coming in to the studio. The conversations between us have given us an insight into other creative mechanisms. Some of it is just plain interesting and does not spark movement ideas, but there are times where we can borrow structures and ideas.

Musical composition is obvious, anatomy in painting and sculpture, the links between anatomy and architecture, the measurement of a pace, architecture and the use of space, space and timing in the landscape, how language has evolved, the vulnerability of the body, the different uses of material in a building, the stresses in both the building and the body. A store of ideas.

6. No - I am always looking forward to the next work

Answer: The main techniques have been evolved to help the dance artists do the work that choreographers want and need them to do. I am not an authority on ballet but it must have developed since the 19th Century because of the people from Petipa to Balanchine, Frederick Ashton to William Forsythe. Each have required a different emphasis. The simple bones of the technique based on the 5 basic positions are extraordinarily economical and it is amazing what has come out of the use of that simple anatomical architecture.

However, I think that how we use our bodies today has just as much to do with our psychology, a different consciousness. We need another kind of connectedness in our movement. Dancers and teachers from generation to generation have handed down dance knowledge. The same will continue to happen but dancers now need a mental as well as a physical flexibility and the individual training they choose will be shaped by their own desires and movement history as well as that of the choreographer. While I have enormous respect for the ballet technique, it does not reveal the mind or body of the dancer in the way I need. We need to keep up the research on how dancers and choreographers want contemporary dance training to develop, and not to be engulfed by the classical tradition. We don't need to be.

Thank you for asking such nail biting questions. For every sentence written I have probably have a hoard more of thoughts - not always clear. The travelling has finished and we were a great success in Philadelphia. We were very spoilt and enjoyed every minute. Now back to work in Cambridge and London and the last performances of ‘Bird Song’ Please keep in touch.

Siobhan Davies
September 2005