Daily Inspiration Quote by Siobhan Davies

“The dance world is too small” lands like a compliment disguised as a warning: intimate scenes can be electrifying, but they can also become echo chambers. Coming from Siobhan Davies, a choreographer whose work has long sat at the crossroads of contemporary dance, visual art, and architecture, the line reads less like outsider critique than insider diagnosis. She’s naming a culture that thrives on proximity - bodies, rehearsal rooms, shared vocabulary - and admitting that the same closeness can curdle into insularity.

Her phrasing matters. “Too intense” isn’t just about long hours or physical strain; it points to a social temperature where taste, status, and approval circulate quickly and stick. “It rattles around itself” is vivid because it’s kinetic: dance is motion, but here the motion goes nowhere, trapped inside the same small container. The subtext is about infrastructure as much as aesthetics. A “small” world tends to be underfunded, gatekept, and overly reliant on a few institutions, critics, and grant ecosystems. When opportunities are scarce, risk shrinks; experimentation starts to look like bad career strategy.

“Needs exposing to other ideas” isn’t a call for dance to dilute itself or chase trends. It’s a push for cross-pollination that keeps the form alive: collaborations beyond the usual suspects, audiences beyond the converted, and influences that don’t arrive pre-approved by the dance circuit. Davies is arguing that dance’s intensity is its power - but only if it’s porous enough to let the outside in.