ARTISTS TALKING

# 10 [4 November 2011]

Alexis investigates, article five: A conversation with Siobhan Davies about dance thinking

Recently choreographer Siobhan Davies has seemingly turned curator, commissioning four new collaborations between dancers and visual artists, the results of which are being shown in an exhibition titled Siobhan Davies Commissions, running from the 4 –13 November at Bargehouse, London  (www.siobhandavies.com/dance/dance-works/sdc.html). 

This will be the third major show in visual arts territory from Siobhan Davies Dance following The Collection at Victoria Miro Gallery and IKON Gallery Birmingham in 2009, and ROTOR at Siobhan Davies Studios and South London Gallery in 2010 (touring in 2011 to Whitworth Gallery in Manchester and Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh). Of the four commissioned dance artists, Henry Montes, Gill Clarke, and Sarah Warsop are partnered respectively with video and performance artist Marcus Coates, Turner Prize-nominated Lucy Skaer, and craft artist Tracey Rowledge. The fourth, Deborah Saxon, is working with Henry Montes and Bruce Sharp, who works in video, sound and drawing.

As both visual artist and dance maker, I was interested to know why cross art form dialogue has become such a key part of Siobhan’s artistic output. We met for an hour one crisp October morning in Siobhan’s glass fronted office in South London. I talked with Siobhan about how curating had become an extension of her own choreographic trajectory, why collaboration is important to her and how all of this relates to her personal campaign to promote dance thinking as a generator for ideas in other art forms. Talking with at times her eyes shut, hands floating back and forth, Siobhan gently uncovered the words to give me an insight that I share with you here. 

Read on to part one... 

# 9 [4 November 2011]

Article five part one... 

So what does happen when a choreographer is situated in the role of curator? From our discussion I glean that Siobhan put together the collaborators for this series of commissions, in a way was in essence very choreographic. She set the initial scenario in which three pairs and one trio would come together, the rule being that neither party was to compromise but that true collaboration would be honoured. Collaboration is at the heart of making dance and dancers are a huge part of the process. They carry inside them a knowledge base for the work as well as being the physical material for it. This is acknowledged in varying degrees by choreographers and Siobhan is the kind that openly recognises the contribution that the dancers make. She says: 

' I have always worked best with a group of artists in which the feedback loop between myself and them is a constant exchange of what is possible with what we are doing. I like that variety of voice and intelligence in the making of the work and I honour the fact that it is the dance artists, the performers, that have to be the work when we have reached the point of having a dialogue with the audience'. 

I asked why it was interesting to her to commission collaborations with visual artists that were, in all cases but one, previously unknown to her dance artists. She told me that these commissions are an opportunity for her and the dance artists to see that dancer’s bank of knowledge and experience in a new light, through the lens of the newcomer with a freshness and new vitality. Siobhan and her dancers have worked together for a long time and  moment had been reached where she wanted them to make work. To trigger this she choose four visual artists for them to partner.

I was interested to know how long these new relationships had taken to build and how they had started. As all the dance makers reading this will know, a common starting place for dancers is to move in the space together and see what emerges, establishing the physical relationship first. Siobhan told me that in this case, this was not the only option due to the different art forms coming together, and that also the act of discussion about the work presented new opportunities. The pairs soon found that they had different reference points and words that normally brought connection, initially brought confusion, holding different meanings for each person. In order to find a process with which the artists could work together, a sort of archaeology had to take place, an uncovering of their experience and understanding of things, words and concepts. 

Further conversations with some of the collaborators revealed that it was through this process that some of the most interesting things came to light. Things that each person had previously taken for granted, things that formed part of their automatic knowledge base that they brought to a work, which may not have played a very large part before emerged as new and interesting ground for discussion. As dance artist Gill Clarke put it: 

'The very special aspect of this commission was that it gave time – and trust- to explore and not to have to turn our attentions immediately to focus on ‘what are were going to make ?’, which is the scenario much more likely to have kept us in what we already knew, in our own separate practices, somehow brought together or combined. 

Instead we were free to explore interests that we discovered we held in common or propositions we could get intrigued by, and allowed different forms to emerge that were not at all restricted by our individual disciplines. And yes, this did both reveal insights into each other’s practices and a chance to reflect on our own'.   

 

Read on to part two ...

# 8 [4 November 2011]

Article five part two.... 

I know all too well from my own visual arts practice that if left to one’s own devices, it is easy to spend a lot of time saying them same thing and wondering how to get at what is underneath this. It is not until a body of work has been established that you catch a glimpse of this rich resource emerging, often overpowered by this dominant statement that you just can’t help repeating. 

Before training in dance, I was resistant to pinning my work down during the making process. I preferred that it evolved through a meandering and lengthy adventure to find new ground, rather than fitted a brief as such. The finished work then became a mirror, reflecting those things I couldn’t consciously articulate at the time from deep within my knowledge base. In this way I was having a conversation with myself through the work, externalising and making plastic the inner world. Dance training brought a shift in my thinking and I now see the benefit of talking to myself a bit earlier on in the process. I now have specificity in my approach during certain phases in the production cycle, and employ a process of constantly reining the work in, checking that it is communicative, honest, interesting and relevant. 

This involves words, something visual artists can sometimes be a little scared to involve in case they over power their visual language. To a visual artist words are sometimes seen to operate in a way similar to the dreaded overpowering gluteus maximus and the quads over the smaller muscles around them. Dancers on the other hand seem to have evolved a mode of discussion that is very open and doesn’t squash movement language but in fact helps us to get deeper into it. My conversation with collaborator and craft artist Tracey Rowledge revealed that she had experienced a similar shift after her encounter with dance thinking. She says: 

'Sarah (the dance artist) is highly articulate during the process of developing a piece of work. My practice is mainly solitary, as a result I realise I’m not used to articulating my ideas in transit, for me, the language for a new work normally develops at the end of the process, not during it. Our process needed to be discussed rigorously throughout and it was an interesting struggle for me to find the language to fit, it was a good type of discomfort as only through that struggle could Sarah and I progress with the work.' 

The value of these collaborations to all involved is clear, but there is something else at stake which is meaningful to the future of dance. That is the part that they play in Siobhan’s drive to situate dance as a knowledge base and a generator of ideas in other disciplines. She points out that dancers are all too often labelled as receivers of information only, and their capacity to inform goes unnoticed. The desire to see the influence of dance thinking on other art forms has been a driving force behind Siobhan's last two exhibitions; The Collection at Victoria Miro Gallery and IKON Gallery Birmingham in 2009, and ROTOR at Siobhan Davies Studios and South London Gallery in 2010 (touring in 2011 to Whitworth Gallery in Manchester and Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh). Just as the dancer is often the unseen contributor in choreographic works, the modes of experience and thought processes that they employ bring light to a sphere of human experience that also often goes unnoticed. That 'switched on' experience of the world from inside of a body goes untapped. 

Read on to part three... 

# 7 [4 November 2011]

Article five part three...

Many non dancers are in fact unaware of their bodies, only noticing the living, breathing, constantly cell dividing structure that they inhabit 24 hours a day, when a strong signal of pain, excitement or pleasure is sent from the body to the brain. The headache that says drink more water, the stomach churning at the realisation the wallet is gone from the handbag where it was left, and (no giggling) during sexual relations. 

Some of the socio-cultural implications of these contexts for body awareness can be so polemic that they tend to overpower discussions about the subtler lived experience of movement in a body that Siobhan has devoted her artistic explorations to. The sexual context of the body in society brings up a whole raft of perspectives that distract us from the subject of embodied movement. Women have been discussing these, campaigning around them, making art and writing complex philosophical theories about them as they have climbed the mountain of equality. In the 1970s French linguistic philosopher Julia Kristeva wrote many theories about femininity, the body being labelled the feminine domain by patriarchal culture, with men getting the (ever more important) cerebral things such as language. Kristeva traced ideas about the body being abject back to the story of Adam and Eve, when childbirth (arguably a woman’s most important spiritual and emotional journey) was rebranded as a punishment for succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh. 

In daily life our perception is also often somewhat reduced by the way that we live and the modes we that choose to engage with the world, and I am passionate that we should not lose the intelligence of the body. Recently though a shift does seem to be afoot. The recent discoveries of neuroscience and collaborations between dancers and scientists, philosophers and artists are beginning to create some space around this concept of the body in motion and opportunities to talk about it without other agendas creeping in. In fact collaborator and dance artist Gill Clarke has recently led the PAL Movement and Meaning Lab, which is described on the PAL website as ‘a cross-disciplinary enquiry into our embodied nature, bringing together the physical and sensory curiosity and intelligence of dance artists, with scientists, social scientists, and influential policymakers and opinion-formers across culture and education. A project that places movement and movement based thinking in the centre.’ 

Dance artists put me in mind of gazelles, perfectly toned collections of intelligence and muscles communicating, with the eyes and ears twitching, in a constant state of signal and response, perception and adjustment to their surroundings. They carry with them vast knowledge about movement and embodied perception that is only just starting to be tapped, as Siobhan puts it: 

‘We bring with us a vitality of knowledge and an ability to do which is unique. The ability to be in the world and to have feedback loops with the various relationships that we have. It is a skill, one that has been observed by others and I think visual artists have in fact been observing this skill for a very, very different perspective for quite some time and that gives me energy. 

Dance has within itself an intelligence that highlights human thinking and activity in a particular form. The more I see dance and the dancers exploring the complexities, the more exited I get by this form of communication.’  

Alexis has a website www.alexiszeldastevens.com and a blog www.encounterproject.blogspot.com

She has written four previous articles about art and dance coming together which can be read here:

 www.danceuk.org/news/article/artist-alexis-zelda-stevens-writes-series-articles-dance-uk-about-art-and-dance/

# 6 [18 March 2011]

I first came across Peter Lanyon's paintings over ten years ago. At the time I had a conundrum, I was looking at a career in the visual arts but my natural affinity was with moving in the world, not looking at it. My only arena for this was ballet and I was awful at it, my teacher often having to disguise her horror at my imprecise joy in throwing myself around. There were no release based contemporary dance classes on the Isle of Wight where I had grown up or things may have been different. I spent a lot of time outdoors on the beach and I wanted to paint how it felt to physically be in landscape, rather than what it looked like viewed from a fixed point. Lanyon did just that and I felt such an affinity with him that at 18, I made a decision. I moved 300 miles away from home to experience what he had, paint what he had, and immerse myself in his homeland, Cornwall. I was subsequently reffered to by critic Max Andrews in  New York Arts Magazine as part of the St.Ives New School (read the article here). Tate St. Ives has recently held a restrospective of Lanyon's work called Peter Lanyon, which ran from October 2010 to the end of January 2011.

So why am I writing about this for dancers? If you have been following this series you will know that I now make movement as well as visual art. Furthermore Lanyon was interested above all in movement, and his articulation of sensation and the effects of gravity on the human body are something that I think many dancers who have studied contemporary techniques will relate to. The friend that I went to see the retrospective with, a painter and designer/ maker for interdisciplinary theatre, was struck by how odd it was for a man so preoccupied with movement to have chosen painting as his media of choice. Lanyon was interested in exploring 'forces greater than ourselves'. On flying a glider plane he observed that 'sitting in the air you are sitting in all dimensions'. Lanyon developed an abstracted visual language to express sensations, the idea of becoming a bird or to articulate the way air moves up the cliff.

These are all plainly recognisable as movement themes. Those of us trained to be aware of what is happening in our bodies from minute to minute will know that.....

Read the full story here: www.danceuk.org/news/article/alexis-investigates-d...

# 5 [14 December 2010]

Alexis Investigates Dance and Visual Arts. 

Article Three: falling in love with another art form, Yvonne Rainer and my divorce from painting.

Part two: (have you read part one yet?)

Dance is not a rare being for you to ogle, it is a media used by artists, and that is a very different thing. 

I had the privilege of hearing Yvonne Rainer speak at the MOVE: Choreographing You Weekend.  I was sitting next to a group of dancers who were working as ‘ activators’ in the MOVE exhibition, and performing, Rainer’s piece Trio A. On the other side of me was Susan Sentler, who was also in New York when Rainer was making Trio A, and like Rainer, trained under Martha Graham.  The two poles couldn’t have seemed further apart in my mind.

Susan seemed to be chuckling every now and then and later explained that there was a lot of American humour in her talk that I missed. It made me realise how many assumptions we make when someone appears to be speaking the same language as us. American is in fact not English, although it does sound similar.

What Yvonne does with dance, could be easily misunderstood if one was to try and read it in terms of what we know as dance. I know quite a few Ballet dancers, and the work that they put into their careers is phenomenal. It is a lifetime dedicated to the conventions and elite ability of centuries of tradition.  Yvonne Rainer’s refusal to look up to the institution could still anger dancers today. Still with courageous integrity, she risked this, to be true to her fascination with spectatorship. 

Yvonne is not flamboyant, she has a deadpan manner that is disarming and also makes her quite a formidable figure.  She also had an ability to ask disarming questions, as she did at points throughout the weekend.

She talks about Ballet historically being ‘decorative’.  What she was trying to do it seems was to get to the bottom of what movement is, when it is not embellished with other things. In 1965 in the No Manifesto she said:

‘No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved’.

Influenced by Minimalist art, which sought to make art an object above all else, Rainer was interested in the body as an object. One that could be treated without feeling or desire, and could even be manipulated like an object if it stopped moving itself.  However she found that while an object could have a relationship with the audience that wasn’t ‘political’, when a person was involved it was a different story. The undeniable potency of a person being present, straight away created a performer/spectator relationship.

This brought the work firmly back to human territory where emotion, empathy, and power all come into play. Rainer tried at first to break this relationship by instructing that the eyes of the performer must never meet those of the audience, the should not use their gaze in a dance way, that is to project their ‘dance self’ to the audience.  She realized how politically charged the gaze of the spectator was and she went on to explore power in relationships through film, seven of which are currently on show at  The British Film Institute.

This show gives you a chance to experience some of these key works alongside her seven feature films and a new work After many Summer Dies a Swan: Hybrid (2002).  In this latest work she uses a series of literary excerpts,  to do with the decline of the Austro Hungarian Empire in Vienna, set against a dance commissioned by her by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation in 2000.

The piece is set in the round and you can follow it round the walls on a chair with wheels, dancing with the other viewers as you go.

For booking information please visit:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/exhibitions/bfi_gallery 

Alexis also has a blog at: 

www.encounterproject.blogspot.com

# 4 [14 December 2010]

Alexis Investigates Dance and Visual Arts. 

Article Three: falling in love with another art form, Yvonne Rainer and my divorce from painting. 

Part one:

Throughout December The British Film Institute  is showing Yvonne Rainer’s feature films alongside an exhibition of her work and inspirations, what better time to talk about her.

As an artist with integrity, you have to be prepared to follow your line of enquiry to the end wherever it may take you.  This very situation stared me in the face three years ago, and it was heartbreaking to realise that my love affair with painting was over.  After basing my identity, and whole world around striving to be the next great painter, I had fallen for another art form - dance.  What is more I wasn’t trained in it and I was 25. However,  as anyone who has fallen out of love will know, you just can’t ignore that pull of something that makes you feel life is meaningful again, offering you possibility to move forwards. So in 2008 I shut the studio door, leotard in hand and ran away with dance.

Yvonne Rainer similarly moved from dance to film. She was co-founder of The Judson Church  during 1960’s in New York, where she first became intrigued by the relationship between the performer and audience, the political and the private in everyday life.  In the 1960’s she rocked the conventions of the dance world, introducing pedestrian movement and using people as props. Her works were task based and looked to the uneducated eye, like someone doing Ballet badly.

In 1975 she left dance for film altogether, after a several yearlong affair, during which she had merged the two. Key works from this period, AG Indexical with a Little Help from HM and RoS Indexical are on show at the British Film Institute currently alongside seven of Rainer’s feature films. RoS Indexical is her take on The Rite of Spring, and AG Indexical with a Little Help from HM is her take on Balanchine’s Agon.

Her films reflect her radical and outspoken nature. They explore alternatives to the conventions of plot and character development and are full of social contradictions: gender, feminism, racism, political violence, housing, sexual identity, inequality, ageing and disease. 

Rainer reacted against the drama of Graham and found the alternative Minimalist approach that was available at the time just didn’t fit her media (the body).

She found that anywhere there were people, there were hierarchies, there was empathy and there was humanness.  She saw the truth of the situation and the conflicts between the thinking of the great men that surrounded her. And in that place of contradiction, duality and politics, she chose to situate her work for most of her career.

She did in fact, free dance as far as it could be freed.  It raised the question, still relevant today, that an art form should be valued for more than it’s wow factor. 

See part one for the rest of this article. 

# 3 [23 November 2010]

Alexis investigates: Dance and visual arts. Article Two. Coffee with Stephanie Rosenthal, curator of MOVE: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery.

29 October 2010.

If the ‘man in the street’ had the sensory perception of a dancer how much time would be saved on the tube? On route from our office near Sadler’s Wells to the Hayward Gallery, I noticed that the majority of people use only their eyes to navigate the world, and seldom hear you are near them, let alone sense on which side you are closest. Weight held off centre, and with little awareness of their limbs or wheelie suitcase, stopping suddenly is disastrous. I experience the world through all my senses and, seeing the level of sensory perception used by the majority, it is not surprising that I have struggled to articulate my perspective for most of my artistic career. MOVE: Choreographing You has said it perfectly and validated not only a crucial line of enquiry in the arts, but also a whole section of the populous that see through their bodies, not just their eyes. I met Stephanie Rosenthal for a coffee and a chat about the show.

Click here to read the full story:

www.danceuk.org/news/article/alexis-investigates-d...

# 2 [23 November 2010]

Alexis Investigates: Dance and Visual Arts. Article One: A Visit to Siobhan Davies Dance Company.

11 October 2010: I visited Siobhan and dancers: Annie Lok, Charlie Morrisey, Lindsey Butcher and Andrea Buckley at the beginning of week seven in their ten week rehearsal period. As I arrived on that Monday morning and was lead up to the Roof Studio by Siobhan I was immediately struck by the sense of calm that I found inside. The four dancers had brought with them various combinations of costume to suggest to EV Crowe (the Playwright) later that afternoon and the shopping trip to get them had been, by all accounts, something like a family outing. The atmosphere was one of focused hard work and delight in working together. 

Read the full story here

www.danceuk.org/news/article/alexis-investigates-d...

# 1 [29 October 2010]

Titled 'Alexis Investigates: Dance and Visual Arts' this series of articles will offer 'ways in' for dancers to the complex conversation that is happening between dance and visual art. I am  Information and Communication Officer at Dance UK and also an artist who trained in both art and dance and works accross both fields as a maker and manager.

Dance is spending more and more time in the territory of the Visual Arts and what is more this started as far back as the 1970’s (some might argue long before that). I am writing this series of articles as a ‘way in’ to this particular area of artistic activity because I believe that dance is a highly influential media and that the knowledge base of its practitioners can bring insight to many other realms. Visual Art can often be conceptual and a bit hard to understand but don't let that put you off! Dance is evolving in many different ways and it is key to the growth of dance that we, the dance community, realise more widely the potential in cross-disciplinary relationships.

The first in the series will be about my recent visit to Siobhan Davies Studios to see rehearsals for ROTOR and I am just off to have a meeting with Stephanie Rosenthal, Cuator at The Hayward Gallery, to talk about 'MOVE:Choreographing You'.

I also have a blog about my artwork here  www.encounterproject.blogspot.com