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Making something together: A conversation about creating and sharing dance knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2022

Siobhan Davies
Affiliation:
Siobhan Davies Dance / Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, United Kingdom
James Leach*
Affiliation:
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, EHESS, CREDO UMR 7038, Marseille, France
*
Corresponding author: James Leach, email: james.leach@pacific-credo.fr

Abstract

In this transcript of an extended interview, Dame Siobhan Davies discusses her biography and oeuvre in the context of an enquiry into aspects of learning, transmission, and claims to ownership over the material that makes modern dance. The creative practice of contemporary dance makers offers an opportunity to describe the “coming into being” of both knowledge and persons in a unique domain, but one also connected to other areas of the arts and collaborative practice. Davies describes an approach to making dance that explicitly rejects two key notions: that the body merely performs what the mind creates and, thus, that the choreographer and the dancer are in a hierarchical relationship of control mirroring the control of mind over matter. She then describes how her creative processes with others have been increasingly shaped to allow non-proprietorial and non-hierarchical outcomes that are substantive to the art works themselves.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

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