Siobhan Davies

in conversation with Alastair Macaulay

Alistair Macaulay: This is Alastair Macaulay speaking for The Voices of British Ballet. And I am sitting with Sue or Siobhan Davies. Sue, I know you are, Sue. Were you originally Sue and Siobhan a stage name?

Siobhan Davies: Siobhan’s a stage name because there was in Equity another Sue Davis.

Alistair Macaulay: Margot Fonteyn is a stage name. But she became known almost entirely as Margot. How many people know you as Siobhan?

Siobhan Davies: It’s a delight. There are moments when I can enter into a situation and I’m chatting away and everybody’s calling me Sue. And at some point, somebody comes up to me and says, It’s lovely to meet you, Sue. But when does Siobhan arrive – and do you tell them? And then I say, sorry, same person.

Alistair Macaulay: Now, where did you begin? Am I right that you were an art student before you became a dance student?

Siobhan Davies: I was an art student and was always utterly fascinated by the action of drawing.

Alistair Macaulay: I notice you said, “the action of drawing” you [mean] actually the physical…?

Siobhan Davies: The physical act of the physical gesture of drawing and the trace it left. And my preferred instrument was charcoal, which of course was hugely messy. We were all on strike, except I kept on going in because I had nothing else to do. And at one point somebody came and said, could I help them with their… must have been their MA work, which was a sculpture which needed lifting and changing. And she said I was not doing it well enough, and she took me to a dance class and I never stopped. I literally never stopped from that day. She took me to Berners Place, which was where the very earliest contemporary dance classes using the Graham technique had been set up by Robin Howard and Robert Cohan.

Alistair Macaulay: Who was your first teacher?

Siobhan Davies: Irene Dilkes. I remember it very well. I think I returned partly, partly because it was incredibly absorbing to be asked to work, what I thought then, was physically. Later on, I realised a little bit like drawing is you need your, the equivalent of, your eye, your mind, your body, your action, your intention, the mark making and reflection on it. But, you know, the first few of those classes, I was just trying to look like Irene.

Alistair Macaulay: What was she like?

Siobhan Davies: She was the first English dancer to get a scholarship to go to the Graham Studios to learn the Graham technique in order to be able to come back to England and be one of the earliest teachers. And I think that must have been set up by Robin. And, you know, she approached the Graham technique with some Englishness, which, of course, at that time I didn’t know. And then fairly swiftly after that, Robert Cohan, Bob Cohan, must have come back into the studios, having had maybe a season with the Graham company. And then that started to lend a whole new definition of what I might be involving myself with. And very swiftly after that Noami Lapserson and Robert Powell came out.

Alistair Macaulay: And were you at that early stage, a happy student, an anxious student, enquiring student, instinctive analytical work?

Siobhan Davies: I think probably instinctive. And enquiring. And frustrated.

Alistair Macaulay: Why frustrated?

Siobhan Davies: Oh because it was, you know … I’d I’d look at Robert Powell in class, one of the most exquisite dancers I think I have ever experienced. He was, he was pantheresque. There was there was nothing but extended sinew in him. And he had massive – technique. And I’d be next to him in class. And you can imagine what I felt like.

Alistair Macaulay: And how did it suit your body?

Siobhan Davies: I don’t think it did particularly well. The Graham technique is is – erm, it’s an extraordinary technique, but my reflection on it, again, much later on is that it works in big strokes. You know, the pelvic action is kind of huge in what it both means, its hinterland, and what the pelvic action produces later on, the arms and the legs are bold. They’re built for theatre. They’re built to make sweeping action. It wasn’t until later when I started to work more with the Cunningham technique with which allowed me to think of the body in smaller parts and in smaller increments of rhythm. And although I wouldn’t call myself the most rhythmical dancer, I was hungry or thirsty to find out how I could break the body down in parts and therefore employ more of myself rather than in these, sort of wonderful but huge gestures.

Alistair Macaulay: With those early classes, how were they accompanied musically?

Siobhan Davies: I can’t remember Judith Knight not playing the piano for us. But I can’t promise you that she was there at Berners Place and Judith Knight was a long, long term accompanying pianist for thousands of classes. Thousands.

Alistair Macaulay: So these were classes before the actual formation of this London School of Contemporary Dance.

Siobhan Davies: The Berners Place ones were before.

Alistair Macaulay: And were they before London Contemporary Dance Theatre also I forget the chronology.

Siobhan Davies: I also forget it, but London Contemporary Dance Group performed at the Adeline Genée Theatre, I think, in 1967. And I was a dancer in the back.

Alistair Macaulay: History! Wow, you were you a part of it right at the start.

Siobhan Davies: I was in the first performance. Yes.

Alistair Macaulay: Oh, great.

Siobhan Davies: Yes, I was in a work by Anna Mittelholzer. And my job was to walk across the back and run around behind the cyclorama and then walk across the back again and run around the cyclorama and walk across the back again. And on one of the circuits, I entered onto the stage. But I entered onto the stage in the wrong co-ordinations. So I moved my right arm and right leg together and then my left arm and my left leg together and had to go all the way across the stage out of co-ordination. Horrific.

Alistair Macaulay: Despite that, did you learn that you were a theatre item?

Siobhan Davies: Oh, yes. Yes.

Alistair Macaulay: And did you guess you were beforehand?

Siobhan Davies: No, I would have been. I would have been, too. It would not have been for me.

Alistair Macaulay: And you only learnt it once you were on.

Siobhan Davies: And once, once I was on and I was involved and so was Richard Alston. But he. I can’t remember if he was in the Anna Mittelholzer a piece, but if he had, he would have got the right coordination. But both of us were Noemie Lapserson’s dressers as well. So we had to get off stage and then during a work, we would, she had to change three to costumes during the work and we were her dressers, but she would make Richard turn his back well to her when she was in the act of dressing.

Alistair Macaulay: So you already knew Richard Alston. He was a fellow student with you?

Siobhan Davies: He was a fellow student.

Alistair Macaulay: Also from an art background?

Siobhan Davies: Also from an art background. He was.

Alistair Macaulay: And how did he strike you then?

Siobhan Davies: Oh, he was. I think that was a sweet warmth, although we were quite different. I would be, you know, bouncing away before class and sweating and stretching and doing this. And and Richard would be reading a book as a warm up. Although he had done ballet classes. So he knew how to warm up. But I just remember him and the Graham technique, I think, did not suit his body either. But he started to choreograph. He choreographed a work which was seen in the Gower Street theatre, the university theatre called Transit so that was before we went to The Place.

Alistair Macaulay: Were you in it?

Siobhan Davies: And I was in it. It was for four women.

Alistair Macaulay: You were just about his first muse?

Siobhan Davies: Yes. And I loved being in the act of being in the studio with somebody making something. I mean, he was making it, but being with somebody during the act of making was extraordinary.

Alistair Macaulay: How did he create in those days?

Siobhan Davies: He experimented. I can see the visual artists in him in this work. We were a tightly wound group in the wings. And then we sort of threw each other on stage and sort of like a whiplash. We were four of us will go out on stage holding onto each other’s arms. So there was a kind of energy and mark making on the stage that I remember. I don’t remember a huge amount of steps, but we would have only been studying for quite, not very long at that moment. But I do remember energy and how he made the four women work as one.

Alistair Macaulay: Those early days then at the School and with this performance you gave with the London Contemporary Dance Group, this is what became the London Contemporary Dance Theatre?

Siobhan Davies: I think it was called the London Contemporary Dance Group then.

Alistair Macaulay: Did it include any Cohan choreography?

Siobhan Davies: Yes.

Alistair Macaulay: What ones do you remember with most pleasure or admiration or the opposite?

Siobhan Davies: With huge pleasure. Eclipse and Cell.

Alistair Macaulay: What were they like?

Siobhan Davies: Eclipse is a duet that is very simple but clear in its structure with a woman being the moon and the man the sun. And there’s a sort of clarity of space in it and encounter. And when I was a young dancer, he allowed me to do Eclipse when I was part of the Ballet for All tour, which is where the Royal Ballet… And at that moment and Contemporary Dance Theatre…

Alistair Macaulay: I believe that tour was the first dance performance I ever saw. It came to my school. Anyway,

Siobhan Davies: Oh gosh. Okay. The 70s. Yes. So. I feel I can’t quite disconnect my love of it when I first saw it with the fact that I did it and learnt so much by the act of doing it a great deal, because those tours were quite long and there were many, many performances and I think Cell politically and energetically and powerfully was one of, you know a very, very fine work.

Alistair Macaulay: Is Cell one of the pieces that people typically associate with performances at the Place.

Siobhan Davies: Yes. It was in a… Norberto Chiesa made a white room and a slanted floor and again, sort of a very carefully choreographed entrances and couples having different kinds of impact on each other. And at the end, a single man is, you know, goes through some kind of could be catharsis or it could be being killed. It had it was abstract in lots of ways, which, of course made it to me even more powerful in how it was worked through. I think there were there were many other works that I had a real kinship to because I did them and I had complete respect for what Bob was doing. But like you, partly because I felt my body wasn’t at its full alertness through the technique, rather than necessarily his work, that I wanted to move on and didn’t know quite how to move on. So there was a certain restlessness in me.