Daily Inspiration Quote by Siobhan Davies

Davies is doing something quietly radical here: she refuses the neat, consumer-friendly idea of influence as something that happens to us. The sentence starts with a correction - "not just" - as if she’s pushing back against a passive model of art and culture where we absorb, applaud, and move on. For a dancer, that matters. Dance is the least archivally secure of major art forms; it survives through bodies, memory, and repetition. Influence isn’t a plaque on a wall, it’s a transmission.

The pivot is agency: "to know that we can play a part in it". That line reads like an ethical demand disguised as a gentle observation. Davies frames participation not as ego ("my legacy") but as interdependence. Her phrasing suggests a choreographic worldview: you’re always in relation to something larger than yourself - a company, a lineage, a room, a rhythm, a public. The work changes you, but you also change the conditions of the work. That reciprocity is the point.

"Outside our own existence" lands with a dancer’s awareness of time and bodily limits. Careers end, bodies age, performances vanish the moment they’re done. The subtext is mortality without melodrama: what makes art meaningful is not permanence but reach. She’s arguing for a more adult kind of influence - less about being seen, more about being implicated. In a culture obsessed with personal branding, Davies offers a counter-aspiration: to be porous, to be part of an ecosystem, to leave traces that aren’t named after you.