Yes - it's the same in any other work - the more you massage your thinking the more capable I believe you are of expanding how you go about things and learning.
Siobhan Davies
We need to think on a broader plane, we need to do more than we're doing.
If I only made dances about my own experience in dance, it would always be on my track, and I don't want that, I want to be on the track of where dance can take me.
The dance world is too small in lots of ways - it's too intense, it rattles around itself, and it needs exposing to other ideas.
Well, it's not full time - my dancers are only paid for six months of the year in two three-month blocks; but yes, it is possible we could do it in another year.
I don't start a piece knowing exactly what effect it's going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.
Independent dance - and, fine, it's a very good thing that it remains independent - is a much tougher life: all dancers expect that, and accept that there will be periods of not being able to work, provided there are choice moments during the year when they really can work.
It's not just for its influence on us, but to know that we can play a part in it, to understand the influence that we have outside our own existence.
One of our problems is our sense of discipline - dancers have an extraordinary sense of self-discipline.
The first 2 weeks, they didn't learn the piece - they went through the process of how the piece was made.
Then I came in twice a week - for my own enjoyment as well as to be a guide. And then we started to apply some of the splinters of the ideas back into the piece.
There's a mass of places, really, where the idea started.
They improve greatly, and sometimes I go and see the performances they do and I am consciously aware that there isn't enough work for the good dancers.
They should be working, and there isn't enough work.
Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible - a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory - in fact I didn't teach Bank, I've used parts of Oil and Water.
We could ask artists from abroad to come in too, so that there could be a mixing and matching of skills from Europe, America and here which would widen our world.
We're talking about people who've already got 3-4, if not 5-6 years' experience or more, and it's about trying to help professionals develop, using us as a resource for that development.
What we do now is to be valued - but we need to do more, so that it's more exciting to other people, and therefore that excitement shines back on us and we're able to have the energy to do more, to widen our creativity.
On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb.
