Daily Inspiration Quote by Siobhan Davies

London, in Siobhan Davies's telling, isn’t just a city with dance audiences; it’s a city with dance memory. Her phrasing - "bricks of ideas built over a period" - frames contemporary choreography as architecture: not a burst of novelty, but a cumulative structure the public has helped raise simply by watching. The intent here is quietly argumentative. She’s defending risk in dance by insisting that risk only reads as risk when the audience lacks a shared history of experimentation.

The subtext is about permission. Davies suggests that London spectators "desire dance to go as far as it can go" because they’ve been trained, in the best sense, by decades of conceptual and formal evolution: postmodern minimalism, narrative refusal, hybrid forms, bodies treated as both instrument and argument. When she says "otherwise might seem out on a limb", she’s naming the precariousness of avant-garde work in places where dance is expected to be either pretty, athletic, or easily legible. London, by contrast, has a mainstream-adjacent tolerance for the strange because the strange has had time to become a tradition.

There’s also a cultural politics embedded in the compliment. A city that can "accept" radical work is one with institutions, critics, venues, funding patterns, and peer networks that normalize experimentation. Davies isn’t romanticizing audiences as naturally enlightened; she’s crediting an ecosystem. The line lands because it flatters London while demystifying innovation: pushing boundaries isn’t a leap into nothing, it’s a step onto a platform the past has already built.