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A true tour de force

The acclaimed choreographer Siobhan Davies has been out of the limelight for a while. But now, as she tells Nadine Meisner, she's back on the road

Monday 16 September 2002 00:00 BST
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Siobhan Davies is so universally liked and admired that she's in danger of being idolised. At 52, she has the seniority and talent to be spoken of in reverentially hushed tones, yet she is young and down-to-earth enough not to be congealed in her own public image. She is very much one of the tangential contemporary dance pack, yet, like Mark Morris, she can engage spectators of all persuasions. Crusty codgers smile and nod, cool twentysomethings congratulate themselves on being so arty. She has for nearly three decades been producing a steady stream of the most exquisitely assured and powerful work.

Two years ago, after her piece Of Oil and Water, she and the loyal dancers of the Siobhan Davies Dance Company jumped off the treadmill of creating and touring. But it wasn't an extended holiday. She gained a CBE, and has been busy with a host of projects. She has been engaged in mentoring and educational initiatives, and has been travelling to look at buildings, many of them in connection with a new work that takes her company back on the road.

Plants and Ghosts features eight dancers and accompaniment by the "sound sculptor" Max Eastley. It also includes an eight-minute text – used, says Davies, "for its structure, not its meaning" – by the playwright Caryl Churchill, an old friend whose writing Davies has long regarded as close to verbal choreography. But why the title? Davies bends her lanky arms in a parallel, "grounded" gesture. "You are beginning a dance, and here you are: a body. That's what you've got, that's it."

But as a dancer the way she used that body was sensational, not just for her way of moving, but for her magnificent, tall, broad-shouldered physique, like that of an adolescent boy – and these days, although the spikily cropped hair is greyish, the body is as long and lean as ever. "The body has limitations," she continues. "You've got just two legs, so regardless of what you want to do, you've got to do right leg, left leg and you are rooted to the ground. But at the same time, fantastically, you have an imagination that soars into incredible places. The balance and excitement consist in allowing imagination and body to work together. You are therefore both planted and a ghost."

Beyond that, she won't say more. She prefers to talk about her search with her production manager Ollie Brown for venues for Plants and Ghosts. The two-year break has been an chance to explore the idea of non-theatrical settings, an option she tried before with 13 Different Keys in 1999, a "promenade" or standing-only performance, although spectators will be seated for this new piece. It will be premiered at a former military aircraft hangar at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire; then on to a Lutheran church in Oslo; a Victorian bed factory-turned-art gallery in London; Saltaire, a model industrial village, near Bradford; and other formerly functional buildings.

Davies and Brown applied several criteria when selecting venues. "It had to be large and preferably without pillars, although Spike Island [a former tea-packing warehouse in Bristol] and the Oslo church have them. It had to be not so ornate and historical that it would totally imprint itself on the piece. But each had to have a certain strange atmosphere, probably to do with employment linked to it." Fitting out the buildings for performance has been a major headache. "Speak to Ollie about that," laughs Davies, "but steady, because he'll go on for hours." Ollie explains how they spent £6,000 on heating for the Upper Heyford site, as well as bringing in electricity, water, toilets, showers and a bar. The total on-site costs for the autumn tour come to £40,000, plus £20,000 for seats.

Why abandon ordinary theatres? Bluntly, because Davies was sick of trying to persuade theatres to take contemporary dance. She started by enlisting the help of the Oxford Playhouse, with which she had a good relationship, to organise Upper Heyford. "I didn't have to lose the audience I'd built in Oxford, but could move the ground by taking them to a simple yet singular space in which their concentration on the dancers, and the dancers' concentration on them, would not be distanced by a proscenium arch. The audience will sit on the two parallel sides of the stage, so the piece isn't front-oriented. And where in ordinary theatres you have to turn up the volume to get your message across, here you can be quite detailed."

Spectator numbers will be small – 350 maximum. "I wanted to make the piece very strong, so it can compete with an art gallery one week and a cotton mill another. But it will certainly have a different sensibility in each place." She wants to continue developing this non-theatre channel and is collecting other spaces for the spring tour. "It's a risk, but I hope this works with all my heart. I think it will help contemporary dance get out of some of its own restrictions."

Davies has also consolidated another project: finding a permanent base for her company, which turns out to be a former school annex near the Imperial War Museum in Southwark, able to provide one big studio and a smaller "research" one. This will make hers one of few British contemporary dance ensembles to have its own home. A lottery grant of £518,000 will go towards the £700,000 for the 125-year lease and architect's planning application, but the final cost will reach £3m. The need for a home struck Davies when she was preparing a piece called Wild Translations. "We were in a church hall, with an unsprung floor, no heating and damp, and a film company arrived to film us. The dancers were wearing gloves and hats and the film crew looked at us and said, what the hell are you doing? I looked at my dancers and thought, this is vile. I felt sick that I'd put them in this position. All you want is to be able to do your best work in a space that allows it. It doesn't have to have amazing sophistication." The company has a temporary home at the Royal Academy of Dancing, Battersea. It's the first time the dancers have had regular use of a sprung floor. "In sustained athletic training, the ground on which you work affects your body and can cause damage." The new home will also help to counter the dire shortage of facilities for professional dancers.

With all these projects and preparations, the two gap years have allowed time for nothing else, except for creating the new piece. Given Davies's long experience it's touching to hear that she is still obsessed with getting better, still obsessed with communicating emotion within a plotless framework. "I think that the language of movement can give information about the act of being human that no other art form can give. I keep having to go back to that to make sure that it keeps getting better rather than worse." She mixes pragmatic humility with a quiet self-belief, and it's an attractive combination.

Touring to Heyford Park, Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire, 19-22 Sep; Victoria Miro Gallery, London N1, 9-18 Oct; Salts Mill, Shipley, Saltaire, 1-3 Nov; Spike Island, Bristol, 8-9 Nov; Corn Exchange, Brighton, 14-16 Nov (enquiries: 020-7228 6020)

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