Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:33:22.624Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2022

Siobhan Davies  and
James Leach Open the ORCID record for James Leach [Opens in a new window]
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: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 29 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: Contemporary Dance, Knowledge, and Models for Ownership , May 2022 , pp. 141 - 155
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cvejić, B. 2015. Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Dance and Performance. London: Palgrave MacmillanCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, S. 2017. Materials Rearranged To Be. London: Siobhan Davies Dance.Google Scholar
DeLahunta, S. 2013. Thinking with the Body. London: Wellcome Trust Exhibition.Google Scholar
Delaney, C. 1986. “The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate.” Man 21, no. 3: 494–513.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laemans, Rudi. 2015. Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance. Amsterdam: Atennae.Google Scholar
Leach, J. 2003. Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Berghahn Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leach, J., with Stevens, Catherine J.. 2020. “Relational Creativity and Improvisation in Contemporary Dance.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 45, no. 1: 95–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1712541.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift, Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar