Siobhan Davies Studios, London
November 6, 2026
As London settles into late autumn, I return to the beautiful wooden Roof Studio at Siobhan Davies Studios for Living Image: Chapter 2.
Celebrating the Studios’ twentieth anniversary, Living Image invites twenty artists across four chapters to spend five days exploring Siobhan Davies’ 1977 solo Sphinx and creating their own responses. Two approaches emerge: the memories and traditions carried by the body, and the exploration of movement itself.
The audience gets to dance a little too, moving around the studio between performances as the space is rearranged for each work.
Akeim Toussaint Buck’s Coming Home combines fluid movement, singing, flute playing, recorded speech and the sound of water. His dancing has the quick, intricate rhythms of African dance, at times shifting into a more contemporary, evenly counted beat. Waves travel through his shoulders and arms, giving the movement something of the flowing quality of water.
The spoken text moves through ancestral memory, colonialism, capitalism, environmental destruction and grief. Buck runs around the studio, asking the audience what they want. “Water!” comes the collective reply, repeated together. Amid the many ideas in the text, the simple physical demand for water becomes something everyone can share.
Subathra Subramaniam’s Keeping Our Heads Above Water approaches memory through bharatanatyam, its distinctive Indian classical rhythms alternating with more contemporary beats.
She enters with her hands shaping a flower crown, then removes it and lays it on the floor. She cups water in her hands to water the flowers, washes her hands and brings them to her head. To someone familiar with dance form, the gestures tell a recognisable story. Flowers, birds and water appear through familiar hand movements, while waves formed by her two hands give water a particularly clear physical presence.
A recorded voice speaks of polluted water, ancestral journeys and survival. Subramaniam keeps the storytelling language of her classical training while bringing it into a contemporary context.
Water runs through both works, and rather neatly, through the beginning and end of the evening. Both artists draw on distinctive cultural movement traditions, yet allow contemporary rhythms and concerns to enter their dancing.
Sheri King and Jules Cunningham’s Elonging is a delight.
They arrive shoulder to shoulder, shuffling backwards through the doorway, their feet brushing along the floor. Without music, they begin moving together, copying one another, exchanging glances and breaking into smiles. Sometimes they seem barely able to contain their laughter. It feels like watching two children inventing a game.
Their physical differences make the exchange all the more engaging. Cunningham has beautifully extended lines and exquisitely pointed feet. King is sturdier, her movements less conventionally polished, but her strength and balance are remarkable. Lying on the floor, she raises both legs while arching her upper body, holding the position with only her head and pelvis in contact with the ground. Later, standing on one slightly bent leg, with her other knee raised in a running pose, she tips her whole body backwards from the hips and holds the balance, as steady and beautiful as a sculpture.
There are small jetés, passages of dancing and moments of stillness. Yet the pleasure lies less in individual movements than in the attention the two performers give each other. King looks towards Cunningham, who smiles back, and their shared enjoyment becomes infectious.
Charlie Morrissey’s What moves gets taken by the wind is a more solitary exploration. Dressed in white, he begins seated on the floor within an irregular five-sided projection. Fine patterns gradually suggest rain and branches stirred by wind, accompanied by a wind-like sound.
Morrissey twists and turns on the floor, changing the angles of his body and experimenting with different points of support. Sometimes a hand initiates the action, carrying movement through the body and onwards. He explores different ways of falling and rising, and traces circular pathways along the ground. One physical possibility seems to lead him towards another.
After the performances, I finally get to see footage of Davies’ own Sphinx, together with Animal Origins (2022), in which she reflects on the explorations behind it.
Davies recalls wanting to reconnect the different parts of her body, looking to animals for ways in which the spine and limbs might work together. Photographs show her young, naked body exploring these possibilities: crouching with bent knees and raised heels, curving her spine, stretching along the floor like a hunting cat, or supporting herself on hands and feet. Her long, slender limbs form shapes that are both strange and striking.
The surviving footage of Sphinx is blurred, but the movement remains remarkably clear. Davies shifts between animal-like postures and elegant dance extensions, folding, stretching and transforming herself into something halfway between human and animal. There is a wonderful musicality in the way these movements are combined and developed, in their changing rhythms and the transitions between one physical quality and another. Strange and graceful, Sphinx is a fascinating dance in its own right.
Looking back at Elonging, I begin to see King and Cunningham differently. Those two playful children now seem rather like two young animals, watching, imitating and testing what their bodies can do. Their bodies are quite unlike Davies’, yet they find their own ways of making unusual movement beautiful.
With Chapter 3 coming in February, I am already looking forward to returning to the Roof Studio.