Siobhan Davies quotes:

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  • One of our problems is our sense of discipline - dancers have an extraordinary sense of self-discipline.

  • Well, it's not full time - my dancers are only paid for six months of the year in two three-month blocks; but yes, it is possible we could do it in another year.

  • We're talking about people who've already got 3-4, if not 5-6 years' experience or more, and it's about trying to help professionals develop, using us as a resource for that development.

  • On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb.

  • They improve greatly, and sometimes I go and see the performances they do and I am consciously aware that there isn't enough work for the good dancers.

  • We could ask artists from abroad to come in too, so that there could be a mixing and matching of skills from Europe, America and here which would widen our world.

  • We need to think on a broader plane, we need to do more than we're doing.

  • Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible - a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory - in fact I didn't teach Bank, I've used parts of Oil and Water.

  • The dance world is too small in lots of ways - it's too intense, it rattles around itself, and it needs exposing to other ideas.

  • I don't start a piece knowing exactly what effect it's going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.

  • Then I came in twice a week - for my own enjoyment as well as to be a guide. And then we started to apply some of the splinters of the ideas back into the piece.

  • There's a mass of places, really, where the idea started.

  • Yes - it's the same in any other work - the more you massage your thinking the more capable I believe you are of expanding how you go about things and learning.

  • If I only made dances about my own experience in dance, it would always be on my track, and I don't want that, I want to be on the track of where dance can take me.

  • Independent dance - and, fine, it's a very good thing that it remains independent - is a much tougher life: all dancers expect that, and accept that there will be periods of not being able to work, provided there are choice moments during the year when they really can work.

  • It's not just for its influence on us, but to knowknow that we can play a part in it, to understand the influence that we have outside our own existence.

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