Siobhan Davies

Siobhan Davies – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Discover the extraordinary journey of Siobhan Davies—from her beginnings as an art student to becoming a leading English contemporary dancer and choreographer. Explore her biography, key works, philosophy, and lasting legacy.

Introduction

Siobhan Davies, often hailed as one of Britain’s most influential contemporary choreographers, has over five decades of creative work behind her. Born in 1950, she has transformed from a dancer in pioneering companies to a visionary creator working across dance, visual arts, film, and site-specific performance. Her bold experiments in movement, space, and composition have left a profound mark on modern dance, inspiring new generations to reconsider what dance can express.

In this article, we’ll explore the life, career, artistry, and enduring impact of Siobhan Davies—her struggles, her breakthroughs, and the wisdom she’s shared through movement and words.

Early Life and Family

Siobhan Davies was born Susan Davies on 18 September 1950 in London, England. Her mother, Tempe Mary Davies, worked as a journalist, and her father, Grahame Davies (sometimes spelled “Grahame Henry Wyatt Davies”), ran a small textile business. She attended Queensgate School for Girls in her early schooling years.

Though born “Susan,” she later adopted the name Siobhan when she began her dance career, partly because another dancer named Sue Davies was already active in the profession.

From childhood, she showed artistic leanings. Before dance, she studied art and design, initially drawn to the physical gesture of drawing and the trace that movement left in space. This visual sensibility would later underpin her choreographic work, in which she often treats bodies as sculptural elements moving through form, space, and composition.

Youth and Education

In her late teens, as she was finishing art college studies, Davies began taking dance classes. It was a chance encounter that would alter her trajectory: assisting someone in lifting a sculpture led to an invitation to attend a dance class—she describes this moment as life-changing.

In 1967, she became one of the first full-time students at the newly established London School of Contemporary Dance (then called the London Contemporary Dance School). That same year, she began performing with the newly forming London Contemporary Dance Theatre (LCDT), under the direction of Robert Cohan.

During her formative years, she was exposed to a vibrant milieu of dance, theatre, visual art, and mixed-media practices. She credits this early environment as formative: in one account, she describes how in a single class one might encounter classical dancers, sculptors, poets, experimenters—great cross-fertilization.

Her early technical influences include the Graham technique (with its bold, large gestures) and later the influence of Merce Cunningham, whose approach to abstraction and internal movement resonated deeply with her evolving sensibility.

Career and Achievements

Rise at London Contemporary Dance Theatre

Davies’s career at LCDT developed quickly. She became Associate Choreographer around 1974. By 1983, she was appointed Resident Choreographer, a role she held while continuing to dance and produce new works.

Among her early significant works is Sphinx (1977), a turning point in which she consciously sought to bypass ingrained movement habits and explore movement arising from deeper bodily sources (torso, spine) rather than surface lines. Another major early work is Plain Song (1981), in which she wove together multiple dance phrases, repeating and varying them to allow the movement itself to become its own architecture.

During her LCDT years, she also worked in parallel with independent dance circles—for example, collaborating with Richard Alston and Ian Spink and joining experimental ventures beyond the company.

Second Stride and Independent Path

In 1982, Davies joined forces with fellow choreographers Richard Alston and Ian Spink to form Second Stride, an independent company that toured the US and became influential in the 1980s as a vehicle for experimentation beyond established institutions. Through Second Stride she created works such as Rushes (1982) and Silent Partners (1984).

By 1987, Davies took a sabbatical funded by a Fulbright Arts Fellowship—notably, the first such fellowship awarded to a choreographer. That year of study in the U.S. reinvigorated her practice and led to new directions in her work.

Founding Siobhan Davies Dance and Maturation

In 1988, Davies left LCDT and founded her own company, Siobhan Davies Dance. Her early works under the new company include White Man Sleeps and Wyoming, both of which remain central to her reputation. During the same period she took up a role as Associate Choreographer at Rambert Dance Company (1988–1992).

Over the 1990s, she produced a rich stream of works: Make-Make (1992), Wanting to Tell Stories (1993), Wild Translations (1995), Bank (1997), among others. Her style by this time balanced abstraction and emotional presence: movement as architecture but also as storytelling without conventional narrative.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, she also accepted commissions from major institutions: English National Ballet (Dancing Ledge, 1990), Royal Ballet (A Stranger’s Taste, 1999), CandoCo, and more.

Shift to Site-Specific and Multimedia Work

In the 2000s, Davies embarked on a radical shift: she began moving away from traditional theatre touring towards site-specific, gallery-based, installation, film, and non-theatrical contexts. Works from this period include Bird Song (2004), In Plain Clothes (2006), ROTOR (2010), Manual (2013), and Table of Contents (2014) among others.

In 2006, Davies opened Siobhan Davies Studios in South London, in a converted derelict brick school building. This space became not just a dance studio, but a cultural hub blending dance, visual art, performance, film, and public programming. The architecture by Sarah Wigglesworth won a RIBA award.

From 2007 onward, Davies discontinued touring productions, instead focusing on work adaptable to the studio, gallery, or site-specific environments. She also extended her voice into film: All This Can Happen (2012) is a film composed from archive footage and images, which toured in international film festivals. Subsequent film works include Transparent (2023) and The Running Tongue.

In 2021, Davies stepped down as director of the studios, though she remains active in projects and as a Senior Research Fellow at Coventry University.

Honors and Recognition

• In 1993, she won a Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for her work with Rambert (Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues).

• Later she won further Olivier Awards, including for The Glass Blew In and Art of Touch.

• She was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002 for services to dance, and in 2020 she was elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the Birthday Honours.

These acknowledgments underscore her pivotal role in British dance, not only as a creator, but as a visionary institution builder and cross-disciplinary provocateur.

Historical Context & Milestones

To fully appreciate Davies’s path, it helps to situate her in the broader evolution of British contemporary dance:

• In the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary dance in Britain was relatively nascent. Institutions like LCDT and Ballet Rambert were becoming focal points for new choreographic voices. Davies arrived early and rode that wave of experimentation.

• Her work with Second Stride in the early 1980s was part of a movement in the UK toward independent dance companies that could tour and present challenging work outside institutional structures.

• The late 1990s and 2000s saw a shift globally toward site-specific work, interdisciplinary art, and cross-media practice. Davies was among the first in the dance sector to embrace that shift fully, rethinking how dance might live outside proscenium theatres.

• Her founding of a permanent studio space that doubled as a cultural hub (Siobhan Davies Studios) anticipated the more common modern model of hybrid arts institutions supporting residencies, public programming, and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Throughout these shifts, Davies remained committed to the primacy of movement itself—in tension and dialogue with the many contexts she chose for that movement.

Legacy and Influence

Siobhan Davies’s legacy is manifold:

1. Redefining the boundaries of dance
   She helped expand what dance could be—taking it into galleries, film, everyday spaces, and installation contexts. Her practice encourages choreographers to think beyond theatre and embrace spatial, visual, and conceptual possibilities.

2. Mentoring and institutional impact
   Through her studios and commissions, she has fostered younger choreographers and collaborations across media. The building she created is more than a rehearsal space—it’s a locus of ideas and cross-disciplinary exchange.

3. Pedagogical influence
   Her works such as White Man Sleeps, Wyoming, and Bird Song have been included in dance syllabi (GCE A-level, GCSE) in the UK.

4. Philosophical resonance
   Davies’s emphasis on movement as thought, body as agency, and space as collaborator continues to inspire choreographers who see dance as inquiry, not merely spectacle.

5. Endurance of work
   Many of her pieces are still revived or studied; her film works and installations continue to tour internationally.

6. Cultural recognition
   Her elevation to Dame Commander is a rare honor in the world of dance, signaling how deeply her work has penetrated British cultural life.

Personality and Creative Talents

Siobhan Davies is often described as both rigorous and generous—a choreographer who demands discipline of movement but remains curious, open, and exploratory in her collaborations. Her training in art gives her a visual sensibility: she often thinks in terms of composition, negative space, gesture, and line.

Her language about choreography often evokes visual art: she speaks of “blank slates,” movement as trace, bodies as sculptural elements. She is also deeply reflective; in interviews she describes the tension between control and letting go, structure and emergence.

Her willingness to shift modes—from theatre to site work, from touring to local practice—reveals a flexibility and responsiveness to changing artistic climates. She sees dance not as fixed, but as evolving.

On a personal note, Davies has a partner, David Buckland (frequent collaborator), with whom she has children.

Famous Quotes of Siobhan Davies

While Davies is best known for her movement work, she has shared insightful reflections in interviews that resonate beyond dance:

“I believe that dance can be as intellectual as it is sensual … it can be metaphorical as well as immediate.”

“The movement has an immediacy; it is a state of being, not a representation of it.”

“I crash about, building, dismantling and trying to find my relationship with movement.”

“Dance is a medium in which thought, feeling and action are all contributors to the process of making, are able to be visible in the moving body.”

Though her public record of pithy quotations is modest, these statements reflect her deep thinking about movement, presence, and the body.

Lessons from Siobhan Davies

From Siobhan Davies’s life and work, we might draw several resonant lessons:

1. Embrace change and uncertainty
   Davies repeatedly reoriented her practice—from theatrical touring to site-based work, from movement as performance to movement as installation. Her willingness to reconfigure is a model for artistic resilience.

2. Let the medium speak
   She insists that movement should not be merely decoration or vehicle for narrative, but a thinking, expressive entity in itself. This calls creators to trust their medium.

3. Cross boundaries deliberately
   Her capacity to work with visual arts, film, craft, and performance shows that meaningful innovation often comes at disciplinary edges.

4. Build space for others
   By creating a physical and programmatic hub in the Studios, she supported younger artists, experimentation, dialogue—recognizing that legacies are not just works but platforms.

5. Balance complexity with clarity
   Her choreographies are often intricate, layered, yet retain legibility. This balance teaches that depth does not require opacity.

6. Persist with humility
   Her journey was neither linear nor easy. The repeated pauses, sabbaticals, rethinking of forms—all show that deep work often involves stepping back, re-centering, and returning with fresh eyes.

Conclusion

Siobhan Davies’s life and career offer a compelling portrait of a creative who refused to be confined by expectation. From London Contemporary Dance Theatre to founding her own company, from theatre stages to gallery installations and film, she continued to push boundaries and challenge the definition of dance itself.

Her commitment to movement as inquiry, her integration of visual sensibility, and her fostering of collaborative and cross-disciplinary dialogues mark her as a pioneer. Her influence continues in the work of choreographers who seek to expand what dance can do—legible, expressive, surprising.

If you’d like, I can also share a more complete list of works by Siobhan Davies, or compare her to her contemporaries. Would you like me to do that?