Siobhan Davies has become somewhat of an institutuion. A dance company existed in her name, then a building, and now Dance and Commissions do. But while Davies is a prominent feature of the Contemporary Dance establishment, her work has come to be characterised not by prevailing aesthetic values but by being of pioneering ilk.

In recent years, Davies' has followed her nose outside of the theatre and her choreographic practice has sprogged new arms and legs - extending beyond the realms of conventional dances, beyond even performance.

For her latest project, Siobhan Davies' Commissions, Davies has commissioned four partnerings of dance and visual artists, the outcome of which will be exhibited and performed at the Bargehouse, Southbank, from 4-13 November. I interviewed Davies last week, just as they were going into production. Particular points of intrigue: how Davies has embodied the changing role of choreographer come curator-commissioner; her move towards a more equal practice with fellow art practitioners; and her advocacy of the 'visual art model' to further thinking about dance and dance practice.

FWW: A week on Friday [4 November] you have your opening of Siobhan Davies Commissions. And this commission, your commission, has been in the pipeline for more than two years?

SD: Yes, yes it has.

And I imagine there was even more time before that where you were thinking about what you might like to do?

There are the four dance artists who are involved in this. Henry, Gill, Sarah and Deborah are artists I’ve worked with over time, for a long time. It has come out of a joint series of enquiries. So the artists have brought their enquiries to me and I have brought mine to them. At a certain point I think I felt that we had this feedback loop between us that was very extraordinary and very precious to me and I wondered what would happen if I took part of myself out of that and was able to observe them continue their enquiry – but the feedback loop be with another discipline, a visual art [discipline]. Um. I sup-, um. Sorry, I’m just being careful because... Occasionally people have said: 'So, you know, you’ve become a commissioner or a curator and is curating an extension of a choreographic practice?' And I find that a very interesting question and I am not fully able to answer that accurately but in short… My intuitive response to that is: yes it is because it’s about encouraging work into being.

So how you just described your company, about being a–

It’s not a company anymore.

Okay, okay. Yes, yes, yes. Okay.

I know, I know, I know!

Well, I was just about to go into it historically, actually.

Oh, okay.

Because how you just described your group, your 'feedback loop' of artists... It sounds collaborative. And I’m just wondering – I probably should have brushed up on my history, but – where was the turning point where it did change from a company to a group of artists working together?

I think in various degrees its always been there, absolutely, right from the beginning. I sense I had to learn the most important ingredients of my work and to find artists whose ingredients were going to match mine, in terms of together you were going to make something. I think that’s always been there. I just had to get better skills as to how to make that work well and to find artists I could make that work well with. Certainly since moving the work out of the theatre… [it] has meant that the work of the doer, the performer, is under so much more close scrutiny because the audience can be within breathing space of the artist at work. Then the investment that those artists have made in the work and their authorship of that work is so present. So as they are the ones doing it, I want to make quite sure that it is so present on their terms.

Yeah.

Now it doesn’t cut me out at all. It’s just a way of… [deep breath] …trying to make a light, choreographic structure – a steely, light choreographic proposition – in which everybody else is… is, umm…... [clap] don’t know how to finish that sentence.

I’m just curious as to – what you just said, ‘on their own terms’, you know – the artists and what they’re creating and how close range your contact has been with them as they’ve collaborated. How much are you in the know about what’s going to happen next Friday? And would you say the work, um, that you feel akin to it? Like, is there a shared sensibility you have with the artists that is one of the reasons why they’re making this work?

I think we have a shared and mutual respect of how we make work. The four visual artists I knew less well, a couple of them not at all. So my initial ask was to the four – each of the dance artists: I would like to connect you with this visual artist, is that acceptable to you? And they said 'yes' after they had either met them or looked at their work or whatever else. So the initial proposal is mine: set this pairing up. My next proposal was: find, individually, with each pair (one’s a trio), find the right ground on which you might make this work. Find a place – in your minds, in a studio, round a table – and hand yourself and your practice over to the other person as much as you can. Like, pare back, peel back, move away from that kind of surface explanation of your work or what might be on your website or what is your promotional aspect of your work. Move away from that and get down to what matters to me right this moment as an artist – and can I explain that to the person on the other side of the table? And if and when I explain it to the person on the other side of the table they will find it so hard to ask me to compromise my practice because they will know what that practice is about. So find a way in which you peel away, get to the vitals, so no compromise is likely to happen.

On either side?

On either side, absolutely. Err, because there will be language differences, there will be perception differences in terms of there’s a wealth of literature about the visual arts, there’s less of a wealth about the dance arts. So the dance artist is much more likely to have come across writing about visual art practice and therefore, you know, have some idea, more of an idea about its history, its archaeology, its present, in such a way that the visual artist might do. But their movement understanding would probably come much more out , err, Judson Church or Postmodernism or that era and therefore how is the present dance artist able to say: 'historically that’s valuable to me, but right now this is where I am'? So those were the things that I put into practice and I was able to, to some extent, protect that work by financing it and making-, knowing where it was going to end up and all of those things. And then I did let them be and I had no expect-, I had no understanding about what they would make. No – ‘understanding’ is the wrong word; I did not want to imagine.

Um hum.

I don’t think anybody had knowledge about what they were going to do and the excitement is how they have chosen material to work in that they might not have worked in before.

Um. Definitely.

It is a bit, you know, it’s quite dense actually. And there’s four different ways of doing that. And there’s performance in it, in two of the works. Well, actually, in four of the works there is performance in it, but it’s not performance. Err, two are not live. What intrigues me is that in one case it’s a series of drawings, but I am utterly able to see the dancer, the dance artist, and in fact, the book-binding artist initially. I’m able to see their heritage and their learning expressed in this different way in the one moment of the drawing. I find that so much more of an extended practice about what our art form is about. That excites me.

And was that always the case for you? You’ve always been expanding to working, collaborating with people from other disciplines?

There’s a lovely sentence that Don Paterson, the poet, said when I had a conversation with him last year: 'How extraordinary it is when the sister arts temper each other'. And that struck a chord in me because there’s a great deal written and spoken about cross-disciplinary arts and I want to make sure how accurate a statement that is to me. And so to me, the idea of one art or several arts tempering each other feels a little bit more vigorous, as if one art form can ask the other, you know, pounds the other – and not in an aggressive sense but in the desire to sharpen each other, in the desire to challenge [each other] provocatively and creatively and generously. And sometimes to me the word 'collaboration' ends up being about compromise if you don’t take the time and set the thing up in such a way that a search for accuracy is one of the pleasures in-built in it.

Yeah. I’m just thinking about my experiences of making and there usually comes this point where there’s a certain amount of: 'you’re standing on the edge of the pool-

Yes.

-and you need to jump in'.

Um.

Personally, would you say you wouldn’t want to ever begin without having made some conscious decisions beforehand?

I think it’s really good to kind of talk turkey. You know: this is how I work. Otherwise the other person’s going to ask you to try and achieve something, which you can certainly alter but they need to know that you’re altering. Otherwise they take for granted that this is how you normally work. So then when that person reaches the edge of the pool and actually can’t jump in because so much of something that’s vital to them has been taken away – that’s when compromise happens.

Um hum.

And I can see what you’re getting at. You’re saying, 'so where’s the danger in this?'

Yeah, I suppose there is an interest in whether something you weren’t expecting of yourself or that isn’t typical of you would feel less like your work.

Now this is an interesting conversation because I hadn’t thought about this before. You’re turning round and going, 'so, you took danger away from the process by asking them to over-explain themselves', and I think the opposite.

I think it’s an interesting choice to have that as a baseline, that everyone goes in that way.

No, I agree. Each of them chose a different way of doing that and I’m hoping that my idea was that they would embrace bravery, but they would be more likely to embrace bravery if they found themselves in a discussion whereby they wouldn’t ask the other person to compromise because not to compromise is, to some extent, the bravery. To turn round and say, 'do you know what, we have to negotiate that much, this much further, in order that both of us are able to make this one work'. And I felt that there would be more spark involved in that. And in that sense the idea of one artwork tempering another…

I also wanted to just touch on your contact and outreach on an education level, a higher education level, actually. I was wondering how you felt about your work being repertory at, say, London Contemporary Dance School – work like Birdsong and White Man Sleeps. I know that the postgrads come here [Siobhan Davies Studios] and they come to the Crossing Borders talks and that kind of thing. But then at undergrad level, that’s the work that students are coming into contact with.

It disturbs me. Umm, and then at the same time I need to relax and go: this was a work you made. So as part of the peg, that’s the work you made. Of course, I would want them to be engaged with what I do now and it would be probably something I should look at in more detail. Where I have looked at it in more detail is in young people’s primary school education, where they are absolutely doing what we do now, which is looking at anything from a drawing to a piece of engineering to a poem or a song or a rhythm and doing whatever they want with it, or actually going out and looking at movement and bringing ideas of movement back and making it themselves.

Um hum.

So I feel I’m more articulate there – and with Making Space here and with all of that work going on, [which] I feel much more confident about.

Yes, and there's your ‘Creative Practice' MA now?

There is. There’s an MA linked up with LABAN and Independent Dance and us which has, err, which is, you know, feels more embedded with what we do in this building. And then you get these satellites of Birdsong and White Man Sleeps and your, and I think your hint is right - I need to look at that a bit more because… it’s that sort of strange…

Your piece of repertory isn’t the only-, you know. Most of the repertory taught at that school is dated. I mean it’s not current; it wasn’t made in the last ten years.

But then also, to some extent, their training isn’t always current.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I loathe that word ‘training’, you know. I would rather, at the moment, try and look at art school learning as a way forward in which you’re learning what is current in thinking and social practice and learning that would make your work still have rigour, but rigour in how you would find the right action in the right time at the right moment. Learning prescribed techniques is a different thing. But, of course, for some people that’s incredibly important.

And the, sort of, choreographic plethora or model that you’re advocating through the Creative Practices MA – would you say with that you’re striving to get something that’s open and provides people with as many different tools to making work as possible?

Well it’s providing people with tools, with lines of thought that will lead them to the thing that they could do particularly well. And then they must do that well, you know. That’s the intellectual – the physically intellectual rigour – that you need to… and that’s where LABAN and the people organising the MAs have those strengths to draw that out of the MA students.

Anything else?

We’re trying to set up something on the archive that we’re calling the Library of Processes, which is that any artwork that we help generate – whether it’s somebody who’s made a visual art piece for the building or the commissions – to give to us ingredients that were a vital part of their process in terms of the making. So even if the ingredients is about what they edited out, or if the ingredients is early trigger material that got them to a place where they could work together, or arguments had, or random things that happened in the making… If we could find a sort of virtual shoe-box that they could put these elements in, that after ten years or so we would have many different ways in which artists brought the uncooked substances into their practice. And would that be a rather lovely way of looking at ten years of stuff? The stuff of what we do! What are we doing? We’re trying to, you know, draw out from the world the stuff that has hit us most vitally. And can we pull that together and re-articulate and re-imagine it in another form?

That’s great. Yeah, good for you!

Yeah, good for – phhuuhh!

I forget that it is quite something talking to an expert about their subject. I find myself a little deserted, umming and erring, slowly forming clumsy sentences and questions. By contrast, I am touched by how emphatic Davies is about the artistry and licence behind the work she has commissioned, in awe of her fervour and delicacy. It strikes me that Davies has the wherewithall not only to share but to push this healthy, rich way of working – and beyond South London, too. The light is green in my head.

Siobhan Davies Commissions. 4-13 November 2011. Bargehouse, London. Free Admission.

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