Siobhan Davies explains to the dance critic Alastair Macaulay her initial engagement with dance in the 1960s. She talks about how she began as an art student, fascinated by the act of drawing, particularly in charcoal, and then started taking dance classes with the Contemporary Dance Group. She was introduced to dance by the Graham technique, with its big strokes and large, sweeping arms and legs. There was, though, something lacking, which Siobhan later found in the smaller, more focused movement of Merce Cunningham. In 1967 she took part in the first public performance of what became the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. A little later, under the aegis of Ballet for All, she took part in a tour of works by Robert Cohan, including Eclipse (a simple, clear duet, with clarity of space) and Cell (politically charged, several couples interacting, ending with a single man on stage). At this time she got to know Richard Alston, another former art student, who shared her views on dance. While she had (and has) huge respect for Cohan, she was beginning to feel that her body was not fully alert. She was restless, and wanted to move on.

The interview is introduced by Kenneth Tharp who danced with Siobhan Davies.

Siobhan (Sue) Davies was born in London in 1950. Originally studying at art school, she started taking dance classes with the Contemporary Art Group in 1967. In 1969 she became a member of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and began choreographing in the 1970s. She became the Associate Choreographer of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1974, and its Resident Choreographer in 1983. Important early works were Sphinx (1977) and Plain Song (1981).

In 1981 Davies started working with her own group, Siobhan Davies and Dancers. In Siobhan Davies and Dancers joined up with a group founded by Richard Alston and Ian Spink to form Second Stride, which was influential in the 1980s and toured the USA. Davies left LCDT in 1987, winning a Fulbright Arts Fellowship to spend a year studying in America, the first choreographer to do so. On her return in 1988, she founded her own company, Siobhan Davies Dance, and also became the Resident Choreographer of Rambert Dance Company, a position she held until 1992. Important works created in the 1990s included Make-Make (1992), Wanting to Tell Stories (1993), Wild Translations (1995) and Bank (1997).

In the early 2000s Davies began moving away from pieces for performance in traditional theatres to site specific works, in such venues as art galleries, studios, and even on occasion an aircraft hangar. In 2007 she abandoned touring productions altogether and disbanded the Siobhan Davies Dance company in favour of working with the Siobhan Davies Studios, which had opened in 2006 in Lambeth, South London. This is a multi-media complex enabling the exploration of relationships between dance and movement and the visual arts, film, video, craft, poetry and sound. In 2012, in collaboration with the film maker David Hinton, Davies created All This Can Happen, a film composed entirely of archive photographs and film, which was shown in international film festivals around the world.

Siobhan Davies was appointed DBE for services to dance in 2020.

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