Siobhan Davies's 'Table of Contents' Reimagines Dance Archives as Live Installation

Siobhan Davies's 'Table of Contents' is an open dance archive presented as an art installation, featuring Davies and five other dance artists performing daily in casual attire. They engage with four tables that reconfigure to map theatrical sequences, fostering reactive movements and improvisations. The work critiques how art institutions have selectively engaged with dance over the past five years, influenced by European choreographers like Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz, and Tino Sehgal, whose gallery-suited performances diverged from traditional stages. Davies, who studied art before dance, has positioned her company as a crossover site through exhibitions with Victoria Miro and collaborations at her South London studios. The piece addresses archival challenges from the 1980s to 2000s, where museums favored objects over live performance, and performers resisted inadequate documentation. In one segment, dancers bear each other's weight while discussing movement memories; another involves a dancer falling extravagantly and recalling childhood games. A male dancer performs short sequences prefaced with 'I wonder if the right thing for right now is...', crediting choreographers, echoing Charmatz's 'Musée de la Dance' seen at MoMA. This experimentation suggests dancers envision museums as living entities rather than static repositories, exploring forms that remain vital and alive. The article was originally published in March 2014.