Jerwood Bank 2007

The Jerwood Bank Project 2007 ran between Wed 1 August and Tues 11 September 2007. Led by Sarah Warsop and Doborah Saxon, six professional dancers (Hilary Stainsby, Jennifer-Lynn Crawford, Jia-Yu Chang, Roberta Pitre, Rohanna Halls and Susanna Recchia) were given a unique opportunity to experience the creative and working methods of Siobhan Davies Dance. Watch the project as it developed in the archive, navigate by date or dancer, or view the image, audio and video documentation.
Hear Siobhan Davies speak about the Jerwood Bank project >

Days started at 10am with a morning class until 12pm, with teachers including Gill Clarke, Kate Brown, Giovanni Felicioni, Scott Clark, Eva Karczag, Charlie Morrissey, Stephanie Maher and Sasha Roubicek. Afternoon sessions (from 1pm to 5pm) were run by dancers Sarah Warsop and Deborah Saxon using the Siobhan Davies Dance work Two Quartets as a base.

Throughout the project visiting artists, including linguist Susan Hitch (Thurs 16 Aug), neuroscientist Jonathan Cole (Wed 15 Aug) and actress Harriet Walter (Thurs 9 Aug) discussed the way they work.

Jonathan Cole
Neuroscientist
Jonathan Cole’s day job is as a consultant in Clinical Neurophysiology at Poole Hospital and a professor at the University of Bournemouth. His research interests include the exploration of movement without feedback, or proprioception, and virtual reality as a treatment for phantom limb pain. He is also, as an author, passionately interested in the first person subjective experience of neurological impairment and has written on the experience of living with sensory and movement loss, spinal injury and facial disfigurement (books published by The MIT Press). With Barbara Montero he has also written recently on the emotional aspect of movement and position sense. Having on embodiment from the perspective of loss, he is now interested to explore to phenomenology of heightened body awareness in dance.
Listen to audio from the session >
Watch the session clip “I smile because” >
Watch the session clip “The Man Who” >
Watch Jonathan’s clips of Ian >

Susan Hitch
Linguist and Broadcaster
Susan Hitch studied at Wadham College, Oxford and stayed in Oxford to teach the history and theory of English and medieval English literature at Corpus Christi College and then as a Fellow of Magdalen College. As an academic, Susan has written on Alfred the Great’s ninth century programme of translating important books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon English, and on women’s writing in the Renaissance. But her curiosity about languages and how language itself works goes back further in her own life, to a childhood in Japan, Cuba, Greece and Germany, travelling between places and between language; later she lived in Algeria, Brazil and Poland.

Language is the means by which we place ourselves in a time and culture, whether we’re learning – as children, or migrants, or travellers – or speaking a language which is already our own. Our language gives us an identity which usually feels as natural to us as the breath we use to speak it. And yet we can also use it to ask questions about who we are, to reconsider, remake and relearn. That has been the focus of Susan’s work as an academic: King Alfred using newly translated books to build national identity, the literate Protestant women of Seventeenth Century England recognising the power of writing and using it distinctively. Questions of language and identity are not only historical and academic: Susan continually meets these questions in the human rights-based work of the Sigrid Rausing Trust of which she is a trustee.

It was while she was living in Poland in the last years of Communism and teaching in the University of Gdansk that Susan developed her interest in theatre, first in the particular tension of theatre under close scrutiny from state censorship, whether in Warsaw in the 1980’s or in Renaissance London. She helped to found a project to rebuild a Shakespearean theatre used by the English actors who toured to Gdansk from the 1580’s onwards. Since then she has lectured on drama, especially Shakespeare, and worked as a theatre critic and, more recently, as an actress. Susan is a presenter on Radio Three’s evening arts and culture programme, Night Waves.
Listen to audio from the session >
Watch the session clip “Language doesn’t exist” >
Watch the session clip – “Language: innate or learnt?” >

Deborah Saxon
Dancer
Deborah Saxon trained in Australia at the Queensland University of Technology. After graduating she performed with numerous dance and theatre companies including Expressions and TN Theatre. She joined Siobhan Davies Dance in 1991, and has also performed with Jeremy James and Company, Mark Baldwin and Xorytes Dance Company in Athens. Deborah also works as a freelance teacher in Europe, South East Asia and Australia.
See Deborah and Sarah’s posts >

Harriet Walter
Actress
After training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, she gained early experience with the Joint Stock touring theatre company, Paine’s Plough touring, and the Duke’s Playhouse, Lancaster. She has worked many times throughout her career with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in productions including Nicholas Nickleby (1980), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1981), All’s Well That Ends Well (1981), The Castle (1985), Three Sisters (1988), The Duchess of Malfi (1989), Macbeth (1999), and Much Ado about Nothing (2002).

She was made an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987. Other theatre work includes Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991), Arcadia (1993), Hedda Gabler (1996), Ivanov (1997), and Mary Stuart (2005). Her films include Sense and Sensibility (1996), Bedrooms and Hallways (1998), Onegin (1999), Villa des Roses (2002), and Bright Young Things (2003). She is an associate artist with Peter Hall’s Cannon’s Mouth Theatre Company.
Listen to audio from the session >
Watch the session clip “Words and music” >
Watch the session clip – “Working with text” >

Sarah Warsop
Dancer
Sarah Warsop gained a BA Hons in Dance from the Laban Centre. She joined Rambert Dance Company in 1991 working under the direction of many choreographers including Merce Cunningham, Richard Alston, Christopher Bruce, Mark Baldwin and Martha Clarke. In 1997 she joined Siobhan Davies Dance and has been a member of the company since. Sarah co runs her own company, Snag, which has presented work in then Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tate Britain and the Clore Studio at the Royal Opera House where she is showing work again this summer. Sarah is also a trained Yoga teacher and has been teaching group classes and private clients since 2001.
See Sarah and Deborah’s posts >

Credits
Photography – Pari Naderi
Film and audio – Deborah May at Kinoki
Website – Kathy Barber at Bullet