36 Quotes by Siobhan Davies

Independent dance – and, fine, it’s a very good thing that it remains independent – is a much tougher life: all dancers expect that, and accept that there will be periods of not being able to work, provided there are choice moments during the year when they really can work.

I don’t start a piece knowing exactly what effect it’s going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.

One of our problems is our sense of discipline – dancers have an extraordinary sense of self-discipline.

The dance world is too small in lots of ways – it’s too intense, it rattles around itself, and it needs exposing to other ideas.

Well, it’s not full time – my dancers are only paid for six months of the year in two three-month blocks; but yes, it is possible we could do it in another year.

On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they’ve seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb.

There’s a mass of places, really, where the idea started.

Then I came in twice a week – for my own enjoyment as well as to be a guide. And then we started to apply some of the splinters of the ideas back into the piece.

Yes – it’s the same in any other work – the more you massage your thinking the more capable I believe you are of expanding how you go about things and learning.