Working with the intricacies and vulnerabilities of the human body as her inspiration and medium, Siobhan Davies is a guiding light in the contemporary dance world. She has built up an incredible body of work, at the heart of which is the ensemble dance piece; her company’s most ambitious interdisciplinary collaboration to date, material / rearranged / to / be is inspired by the historian Aby Warburg’s ideas about bodily communication as well as the latest investigations into neuroscience. The artists and choreographers investigate what we reveal and conceal through physical behaviour. I asked Siobhan about the work, and how she is investigating the human body as a tool and an archive.

Eli Goldstone: Let’s talk a little about material / rearranged / to / be. The work is cross-disciplinary in its approach, involving elements of performance, visual art and science. How do all these forms work together?

Siobhan Davies: In early 2015 I was preparing for a new work to be made. As a starting point I invited a group of choreographers, visual artists, designers and writers to come together and talk about what vitally interested them at that particular time. It was clear from the start that one of those interests would come out of conversations we had previously been having with different neuro and cognitive scientists. We are mutually curious about how each of our disciplines might help us better understand the systems at work between the body, mind, movement and communication. The traditional perspective of mind to body is not always useful in describing how we are in the world. We invited them to join us as well in order to get their perspective on how mind and body inform each other.

We opened up these discussions to the public as part of Doug Aitkin’s Station to Station: A 30 Day Happening at the Barbican in 2015, by the end of that week the artists had agreed on some common ground we felt we could all work within and grow out from. Now, in material / rearranged / to / be, we have reached a situation where we want the audience to enjoy finding the connective tissues between each of the works. Even though the different histories of the artists and their approaches to the task might make for unpredictable relationships we believe they all come out of the same family of thinking.

Eli: Who was Aby Warburg?

Siobhan: Aby Warburg was an unconventional art historian – actually, he was an unconventional figure in many ways. Born into one of Europe’s richest banking families, Aby made a deal with his younger brother, Max, saying that he would forego his birthright if Max agreed to buy him every book for which he might wish. Max readily agreed, unaware of the extent of the private library his elder sibling would eventually create. Towards the very end of his life, Warburg worked on what has become, perhaps, his most influential project, the Mnemosyne Atlas, named after the Greek goddess of memory. For this he drew out unexpected affinities between photographs, artworks, often separated by centuries and cultures and pinned them onto large, cloth-covered boards, rearranging them in form and content, how a gesture carved upon a classical tomb might reappear, for example, in a Florentine painting. This was not an attempt to trace a lineage between such manifestations, but rather thought-space, in which the images become something to be experienced rather than merely understood.

Eli: The performance involves some audience participation, how important to the work is this element?

Siobhan: All audiences, whatever the situation, participate once they commit to being there. They provide energy through looking, imagining and reflecting on what they are experiencing and we, as performers, are very aware of that contribution. It matters to us.

We were influenced by Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas when it came to organising our individual works. We noted how an observer might be looking at one image in the Atlas and gradually move their eyes to encompass another. The liveliness of the connections between the works in the Atlas, either through their differences or affinities, helped us to imagine the visitors’ relationship to our works.

In material / rearranged / to / be we have a three dimensional space for the visitors to make choices and move through, instead of having the flat surface of the Atlas. Each visitor can make a unique pathway in order to encounter the different pieces. Throughout the day, the works also migrate to different positions in the space and relate and respond to their new environment, so one visitors’ pathway may not exist at a later point.

There are also other levels of participation. The works by Emma Smith and Efrosini Protopapa invite a visitor to engage in dialogue more directly with a performer if they wish. These works need to be experienced at close quarters, whereas with others the spatial relationship can change according to the visitors’ route through the space.

Eli: Do you think that some people are put off dance because there’s an inherent intimacy to the art form that can be discomfiting?

Siobhan: Oh, a great question, I might not be able to answer well!

When a performer and observer are still, you can’t tell the difference between them. Both are attentive people, but if one begins to behave very differently through an involvement with movement, then the other feels the loss of what they initially and visibly had in common. As the disconnect grows between the performer and observer, perhaps it is losing that intimate connection that was initially set-up, which is discomforting.

In the previous work Table of Contents (2014) I was mostly an observer and I became very involved in watching the shifting relationships between the audience and the artists. Part of the performance was to gather around a table and be in a conversation with members of the public. But then the artists needed to create a little more distance from the audience in order to move. During this small journey something needed to happen in order for everyone involved to shift just enough to deal with communication being experienced in another form. Too much or too little of a shift in focus would dissolve what had been set up before or not create the right situation in order to move and have that movement easily accepted by the public. I learnt a huge amount by watching these journeys.

Eli: I’m interested in your ideas of the human body as a kind of physical archive of movement, could you talk a little more about that?

Siobhan: There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called Funes the Memorious which describes a man who remembers everything in full detail. Everything he has experienced, learnt or seen is in his present memory. Thank goodness we can forget, we forget that we breathe, we just do it without consciously thinking, otherwise we would go insane. But I also wish that we could remember more the story of our bodies’ experience. It is simply not in our culture or language to give credit to how our bodies give rise to our minds.

I am curious how I might get more people to think of the whole of themselves as memory banks not just our minds. Also enjoying that many of our stored memories are made up and how those fantasies affect our behaviors.

From a dance perspective I see the return of movements I have done and re-done differently over the years and how they alter because I have changed my mind about how to do them, or what they actually are, or that I can’t do them now because I have aged. I can take one or a few of these repeated but different  movements and pull them like a thread through my time as a dance maker and they become a core sample of changes. It is those thoughts which make me interested in less traditional notions of archive.

Eli: What are the particular challenges and rewards of having the material of your art form be a living, breathing body?

Siobhan: I am fascinated that we all have a constant, living breathing body, until the moment we don't. I would like to be more aware of the "till we don't" part. It seems that while I am alive I am a body. I don't have a body… I am one. And because I move, think and feel, being involved in dance as an art form is a wonder.

When I began to dance I simply put myself to work, having no idea how much I would eventually be able to connect with it. It is and will carry on being a huge investigation and education, where the challenges can be the same as the rewards. While I believe totally that I move to think and think to move, it is surprising how often nothing seems to happen. Or, I forget what I have just done, and I can't work out which part of me has done the forgetting. It is hard to be the doer and the reflector at the same time but I enjoy the honesty that can come about because of that.

Eli: The installation will be touring – do you expect that it will evolve much as it moves around the country?

Siobhan: We have every desire that it will. Each of the spaces - Tramway, Whitworth and Bluecoat - are very different in their shape and context.

At the Barbican we have a 90 meter curved space and in order to prepare for that we have made a huge score of where and when the different works will take place. We will have to make different scores for each venue and this repositioning will have an impact on each of the pieces. The biggest impact will happen as we grow into our performances with the help of the audience. Instead of imagining someone in front of us, they will be there and responding in probably very different ways.

Eli: Finally, you composed the film All This Can Happen with David Hinton a few years ago, do you have further plans for work in this medium?

Siobhan: David and I have made a second work, The Running Tongue which opened in 2015. It is a gallery installation, rather than a traditional film and was made in collaboration with 22 dance artists, each of whom created their own vision (or scene) within which movement was a luxury. We wantedto create a work for the screen in which dance artists were not used only as performers, but were granted complete control over the images in which they appear.

I am very happy to have extended my Choreographic practice into film making and we plan to make another film in a year or so.

Siobhan Davies Dance
material / rearranged / to / be
Barbican
20-28 January

Images: Pari Naderi.