CriticalDance Forum

Chill winds blow on the catwalk
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews Siobhan Davies Dance Company at the Lighthouse, Poole.


The cold winds blow, the earth rumbles, a woman jitters on the balls of her toes in a searchlight, like china rattling on a quaking table. She's unstable but her face is calm. Don't worry, it's only Siobhan Davies setting questions about movement again.

Davies, a master painter on the stage, decided last year to break with the flat scene and play in 3-D, sculpting rather than painting. She effects this in Plants and Ghosts by sandwiching the dance between banks of spectators. A catwalk thrusts through the audience, leaving open a lot of backs, bottoms and undersides that on stage could be neatly hidden.

Because the piece is intended for unusual venues, it is supposed to make modern dance less frightening. (This strikes me as the equivalent of poets writing on underpass walls instead of in books, a more sociable than artistic act.)

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<small>[ 19 February 2004, 02:49 PM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Siobhan Davies Riverside Studios
By Clement Crisp for The Financial Times


After three decades of making dances subtle, inquiring, always enriching, Siobhan Davies has broken with her own traditions of proscenium staging. With Plants and Ghosts she offers us movement made for unconventional spaces. Since its first performance last autumn, the piece has toured to a disused aircraft hangar, an art gallery, and arrived on Tuesday at Riverside Studios. An illuminated dance area, longer than it is wide, is lit from each end, with the audience tiered on the other two sides of the space. We view the movement against a backdrop of other viewers. The intimacy of our contact with movement is remarkable. The response between dancers is intense, lines of energy connecting them. The devil may be in the detail, but here, with Davies, the talent (and how grand a talent) is also in the detail. For Plants and Ghosts is about detail: about how detail dovetails, about how fascinating movement is.

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Article from The Herald.

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<small>[ 10 June 2003, 01:44 AM: Message edited by: Joanne ]</small>

Siobhan Davies Dance Company
By Kelly Apter for The Scotsman

SIOBHAN Davies has been hanging out in some unusual places of late. After 30 years of innovative dance-making, the choreographer has temporarily turned her back on theatrical spaces, touring her latest work, Plants and Ghosts, to art galleries, disused warehouses and an aircraft hangar instead.

In comparison, Glasgow’s Tramway seems relatively staid, but with its brick walls laid bare and seats rearranged, the venue took on an expansive quality perfect for Davies’s requirements. Having enjoyed the luxury of watching dancers at close range, day-in, day-out for the past three decades, the doyenne of contemporary dance has decided to share the joy.

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Rehearsal romp has dancers so up-close it's personal
By Ellie Carr for The Sunday Herald


Ever wondered what it's like to be a dancer? How it feels to hurl your body around a stage and weave your limbs through a constantly moving jungle of torsos?
Well, watching Siobhan Davies's new work Plants And Ghosts -- a virtual fly-on-the-rehearsal-studio-wall dance show -- is about as close as the non-twinkle-toed among us are likely to get.

This is esteemed choreographer Davies's first show following a two-year sabbatical.

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