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Sound and motion in flight of fancy
**** The Times
SIOBHAN DAVIES'S status as one of Britain's top choreographers is based on extreme dedication to craft, plus salutary doses of sheer inspiration. Her latest work, Bird Song, received its world premiere last weekend as part of the third edition of Dance Northern Ireland's Earthquake Festival of International Dance. Devised in collaboration with the eight members of Davies's company, the hour-long piece is laced with felicitous discoveries and quiet marvels. None of her exemplary dancers is pretending to be one of our feathered friends. Rather, the impetus behind their efforts is an investigation into how sound shapes movement. The performance heightens and blends our senses in a way that enables us to watch closely what we hear and listen intently to what we see.
Davies's starting point was the Australian pied butcher bird, whose alluring call is heard midway. The dance fans out in either direction from this concentrated centre point. The ensemble's range of motion operates on multiple dynamic levels against a rich, varied aural landscape assembled by Andy Pink.
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The opening moments have a witty efficiency and spark, the dancers responding as a unit to ten second soundbites - a motor that won't kick over, a sustained whistle, rewinding tape. Davies sends all of them into quicksilver queues, like hot notes dropped on a stave. Certain sections are improvised, during some of which focus is lost.
The filigree of fidgety rhythms eventually subsides, inducing an alert calm that is the heart of Bird Song. Its the solos that got me. The wonderful Gill Clarke lands two, both beautifully cast in a combination of David Ward's floor-filling video projections and Adrian Plaut's masterful lighting. In one, set to a soundtrack of clicks, Clarke keeps reaching up in a manner that is at once nervous, insouciant and joyous. In his solo, Henry Montes is pure poetry in motion, alternating between arching back with raised arms, twitching his middle and sudden stillness. Clarke and Montes also pair up, melding their superbly attuned bodies together. Theirs is the kind of dancing that seems to make time stand still.
This is what Davies's work, at its best, is made for. In our noisy, hyperactive world, her meticulous subtlety is a cause for genuine excitement. By Donald Hutera, April 2004.
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