ABSTRACT
Siobhan Davies, one of Britain’s leading modern dance choreographers, encapsulates in her work the contemporary dilemma between meaning and abstraction, showing her relation to the modernist tradition of strong dance values (the tradition of, for instance, Merce Cunningham and Richard Alston), while sharing in dance’s recent commitment to narrative. In the 1980s, Davies seemed to be developing her work in two directions concurrently. There were essays in which the pure dance values emerged most stronglylike New Galileo (1984) for London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Embarque (1988) and Sounding (1989) for Rambert Dance Company-and there were works in which emotional states or progressions were more pronounced-like Minor Characters (1983), Silent Partners (1984), and Wyoming (1988), experiments using the intimacy of the small independent dance companies Second Stride and the Siobhan Davies Dance Company. Yet there was no firm border-line between these two polarities of her output, and, in the 1990s, the boundaries have become even further blurred. While Davies refuses to join the issue-based, politically overt tradition of the younger generation of choreographers, with its narrative-based structures, she also demonstrates the impossibility of abstraction in dance. Now, she celebrates the fact that the most movement-led structuring devices produce resonances of meaning, and that even straightforward conventional dance moves contain feeling. Indeed, in Wanting to Tell Stories (1993), her starting-point was to bring out the stories embedded within dance emotion itself, like the tenderness that a dancer might feel inherent in a particular dance gesture, or the joy or abandon within a dancerly jump. Two years later, Wild Translations (1995) continued Davies’s preoccupation with ‘eloquence that parallels but is still different to that of language’. Here the expressive and narrative potential of gesture is suggestive of people in relationships rather than dictating particular events or experiences. Yet Davies never surrenders the richness of the dance language that she has built up over the years, for the formal complexities and manipulation of movement material developed in her more abstract pieces can inform narrative and make subtle its personalities. Her conviction remains that ‘dance can communicate on is own terms’, and it is partly because of this commitment that her work has enjoyed a prominent position within the repertories of the large established dance companies.
