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…
