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BIRD SONG **** - Financial Times
The seating was re-arranged: the audience sits on all sides of a central performing square, beautifully lit with projected shapes and slashing images by Adrian Plaut. The soundtrack, by Andy Pink and David Ward, is episodes of noise and music radiating from a central incident of Bird Song - the ravishing notes of the Australian Butcher Bird.
This placing of the bird's song is key to the piece's structure, which ripples outward from this fact, the dance progressing from an energetic opening ensemble towards the solo for Henry Montes which broods about the bird's song, expresses his fascination with it, then goes partly into reverse as ideas repeat.
It shows Davies at her most searching as a creator. The movement has been mined from responses and improvisations made in the studio by her cast, then refined by Davies, and shaped finally into this extraordinary, challenging work.
Two structural and emotional concerns seem evident. The first is how we, as audience, examine and respond to dance that is physically near us, and seen from differing perspectives.
Instead of the stage's arena at a decent distance, the dancers become bodies almost intimately magnified, the least gesture made important, emotional identities made stronger, the minutiae of the choreography very clear.
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Davies' second concern seems to be the fact of sound as the dance responds to it, not on the banal terms of immediate rhythmic stimulus, but as a way of visualising how it is shaped and disperses itself in our understanding.
So, then, a dance piece that asks questions, provides some answers and, above all, deploys fine dancers in finely tuned, finely crafted activity. Impossible to describe, fascinating to watch, beautifully danced by Davies' dancers. Proof yet again of Siobhan Davies as inspired explorer and national treasure.
by Clement Crisp, October 2004.
Bird Song ***** I much admired at its London showing last year. It was then being shown as a dance to be viewed in the round. Davies has now reorientated it for the stage, and it has lost nothing of its power, its earlier intimacy replaced by proscenium focus. I find it a thrilling and quietly virtuosic display of movement, crammed with ideas, with bravura effects done on a pianissimo, and an overall organisation of commanding power, as dance arrives on stage, changes, lives and flowers and dies and is reborn, responding at every moment to the sound score by Andy Pink. Masterly.
by Clement Crisp, September 2005.
next review...
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