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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