Education Quote by Siobhan Davies

In one clean swipe, Siobhan Davies flips the usual hierarchy of performance: product second, process first. For dancers, “learning the piece” is the expected grind - counts, cues, muscle memory, the polished illusion of inevitability. Davies is pointing to something more radical and, frankly, more honest: spending the opening fortnight not on replicating steps but on understanding the machinery that produces them. The “they” matters here. It suggests an ensemble being trained into a shared authorship, not just a cast being trained into obedience.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the factory model of choreography, where dancers are treated like high-end executors of someone else’s vision. By foregrounding “how the piece was made,” Davies shifts value toward methods: improvisation protocols, decision-making rules, the negotiations and frictions that normally get edited out before opening night. It’s process as pedagogy - teaching performers how to think inside the work, not merely inhabit its final shape.

Contextually, this sits squarely in contemporary dance’s long argument with spectacle. Audiences often see the sheen and assume natural talent; Davies insists on the invisible labor and the ethics of making. Two weeks devoted to making-of is also a strategic investment: when performers grasp the logic of construction, they can adapt, respond, and keep the piece alive rather than museum-ready. The line is less about delay than about depth - a manifesto for work that remembers it was built by people, in time, through choices.