Education Quote by Siobhan Davies

“Massage your thinking” is a dancer’s metaphor smuggled into a theory of growth. Siobhan Davies isn’t selling hustle or raw talent; she’s describing practice as a tactile, almost anatomical process. In dance, you don’t force a body into new shapes by willpower alone. You warm it, work it, repeat small adjustments until range appears where it used to feel impossible. She applies that same logic to the mind: ideas aren’t cracked open by a single epiphany, they’re softened and reshaped through attention.

The intent is quietly corrective. When she says “the same in any other work,” she’s pushing back against the notion that dance is mystical or purely instinctive. Her subtext: creative excellence is not an inherited spark; it’s an ongoing relationship with your own habits of perception. “Massage” implies patience, care, and responsiveness. You listen for tension, you notice where you’re rigid, you keep returning. That’s a pointed rebuke to the productivity culture fantasy that learning is linear and measurable. Davies frames learning as somatic: you change your thinking the way you change your movement, through iterative contact.

Contextually, this lands in a world where dancers are often asked to produce novelty on command while their labor is romanticized as effortless “expression.” Davies reframes the artist as an investigator. Expansion, in her phrasing, isn’t about scaling up; it’s about widening options. The more you work your thinking, the more ways you can enter a problem, and the less you’re trapped by your first, stiffest solution.