Wealth & Money Quote by Siobhan Davies

What sounds like casual shop talk is actually a small manifesto about how contemporary dance gets made: fast, collaboratively, and under the pressure of limited time. Siobhan Davies foregrounds the logistics first, not the “vision,” and that’s the point. A “day” with “25 dancers” isn’t a romantic rehearsal-room myth; it’s an industrial constraint. The phrase “as highly productive a way as possible” carries a double edge: pride in efficiency, and a faint admission that the system demands it.

Her breakdown of the day - “a long class,” then “teaching bits of the repertory” - reveals a choreography culture where technique and transmission blur. Class isn’t warm-up; it’s a funnel into authorship, a way to align bodies quickly so the work can travel. “Bits” matters too. Not whole dances, not sacred set pieces, but modular fragments that can be inserted, sampled, reconfigured.

Then the quiet flex: “in fact I didn’t teach Bank, I’ve used parts of Oil and Water.” That’s repertory as toolkit, not museum. She’s refusing the expectation of a definitive “work” and instead treating her back catalog like living material. Subtext: ownership in dance is porous. Dancers carry memory in their bodies; choreographers curate, splice, and adapt to the room they have. The intent isn’t just to report what happened, but to normalize a pragmatic, remix-driven creativity that matches the realities of making dance now.