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Birdsong Beguiles - The Sunday Telegraph
Siobhan Davies is a rather demanding house guest. Her five-night stay at Covent Garden's Linbury Studio involved turning the whole place upside down to provide the right environment for her new baby, Bird Song, which had its London premiere on Thursday night. It was definitely worth the trouble. Davies's nine dancers burst into our midst like children let out at playtime before chumming up into groups and pairs and inviting us to enter their beguiling world. We were in the theatre for 70 minutes but the images lingered far longer in the mind, like clues waiting to be solved.
In Davies's last piece, Plant and Ghosts, the music was introduced only after the company had begun work on the dance, but Bird Song's choreography was firmly rooted in Andy Pink's captivating collage of conventional and electronic music built around the cry of the Australian pied butcher bird. The lightness and variety of the soundscape oblige the movement to change mood and tempo to match - a positively reactionary concept in some new dance circles.
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The mercurial music also safeguards the whole exercise from becoming a sort of choreographic ventriloquy and allows each of Davies's dancers to develop a distinctive "voice" within the mix. This refreshing diversity is enhanced by Sam Collin's design and Adrian Plaut's virtuoso lighting which transforms and dramatises the space with looming shadows of hovering birds or with mini-eclipses that blot out the light for one dancer at a time.
The work's centrepiece is the song of the bird itself, which feels a mesmerising soliloquy for Henry Montes. Wary and watchful, his body seems somehow to internalise the unknowable avian time signature until the self-absorbed, almost preening movements are stilled or panicked by some silent, invisible threat. In Montes's final duet with Deborah Saxon, their bodies interlock in poses that would be impossible without mutual support (and intensive rehearsal). But instead of evoking the cliches of contact improvisation the pair give the impression of weightless lovers cuddling in space. The piece is 10, maybe even 15 minutes too long but it is packed with pleasures. By Louise Levene, 24 October 2004.
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