Time & Perspective Quote by Siobhan Davies

Independent dance gets romanticized as pure freedom, but Siobhan Davies talks about it like a weather system: harsh, predictable, and survivable only if you dress for it. The line "and, fine" is doing a lot of work. It’s a little shrug at the ideology of independence - the arts-world virtue signal that being outside institutions is automatically more authentic. Davies agrees with the value, but she refuses the fantasy that it’s painless. Independence, here, isn’t liberation so much as exposure.

Her real subject is labor. "Much tougher life" lands as a quiet corrective to how audiences consume contemporary dance: the finished performance looks like an intense, singular event, so we forget the long stretches of unpaid training, grant-writing, waiting, recovering, and hustling for studio time that make that event possible. When she says dancers "expect that, and accept that", it’s not naïve optimism; it’s a contract signed early. The profession normalizes precarity as character-building.

The most revealing phrase is "choice moments". Davies points to a cruel economy where the reward isn’t stability but intermittently being allowed to do the thing you’re trained to do. Those peaks have to justify the valleys. The subtext is both admiration and warning: independent dance survives on devotion, but devotion is also how a system gets away with chronic insecurity. Contextually, it reads like a seasoned insider speaking to funders, institutions, and younger artists at once: keep it independent, yes - but don’t pretend the cost is poetic.