The culmination of Davies’ collaboration with Sage Cowles is Sage Cycle (1975-77). These are three separate film/performances that explore the relationship between the live dancer and the projected image. Sage Cycle was reconstructed and toured in the United States for Sage's 80th birthday in 2005.
In 1975 Davies accompanied the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, for whom her husband at the time, Dennis Davies, was conductor, behind the iron curtain on a tour of the U.S.S.R. Prohibited from shooting film by the Soviet minders that oversaw the visit, Davies was reduced to surreptitiously shooting in 5 second bursts from a pocket camera. The resulting film, a forbidden travelogue titled Faraway Faces and Strange Sounding Trains, stands as a cold war collage of mere glimpses at Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Tbilisi, Boku, Yerevan, and Moscow.
Her experimental home videos, including Frames of Reference, Home Beat, and Spring Snow - Everyone in the Kitchen and Dance, earned her a selection as a visiting artist at MIT's film lab in 1977.
In 1978 Davies and Cowles drew from their experiments in the Sage Cycles to produce their first evening-length piece titled Small Circles, Great Plains, with music by Alvin Curran. Writing about the piece's premier at the Walker Art Center, critic Allen Robertson of the Minneapolis Star declares that “Davies and Cowles create a hybrid art form that is neither dance nor film but an amalgam that uses both arts to comment on and expand each other.” Davies herself had this to say about her role in the collaborations: “For me, the formal problems of dealing with the projected image and live performer become analogous to the problems of all portraiture, and the question persists: what can be revealed, what has more presence – the real person or the image of the person?”
In 1982 she completed The Weather was Perfect, an experimental film using double exposure and chance operation, and featuring the words and music of her friend John Cage. The film is a portrait of Sage Cowles, using footage shot from road trips in the midwest.
Also in 1982 Davies wrote, directed, and produced a feature length film, utilizing three synchronous 16mm projections, side by side, to tell the story of a young girl searching for her name in a dream world. Shot in the Italian countryside, Beyond the Far Blue Mountains premiered at the Venice Film Festival and has been shown throughout Europe and the United States.
She premiered a new collaboration with Cowles, The Palm at the End of the Mind, at Teatre Am Turm in Frankfort in 1983, featuring music by Michael Nymann.
Also in 1983, Davies collaborated with Jackie Matisse and David Tudor to make Sea Tails. Jackie ‘flew’ her underwater kite tails with Davies film in scuba gear, while David recording underwater sound. Davies presented the resulting 3 films, synchronously and in duplicate, as a 6-channel video installation object. The piece premiered at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1983.
From ’83-‘90 Davies directed and produced one evening length performance-art piece after another; The Palm at the End of the Mind (starring Sage Cowles), Preparing the Ground (starring Ron Thornhill), Arrivals and Departures (starring Suzushi Hanayagi), and Mana Goes to the Moon (starring David Rousseve).
In 1990 Davies met dancer/choreographer Polly Motley, beginning a series of collaborations that continue to this day. Their first collaboration, titled Collaboration, featured projected footage of Motley, rolling naked down the sand dunes of Colorado, and was performed at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where Motley was teaching, in 1991.
Davies and Motley managed to collaborate and produce a new performance piece each year throughout the 90's and into the 2000s. Davies spent this time experimenting with slide projections, set design, and live video projections to accompany the live dancer. Examples of this period include Folkdance, and You Can Sing Anytime.
In 1994, at the suggestion of Nam Jun Paik, she followed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's European tour of Ocean, filming the setup, rehearsals and performances by David Tudor and Takehisa Kosugi. The resulting six channel piece, David Tudor's Ocean, has been a perennial resource for academic study of Tudor's performative and artistic process.
In the late 90s and early 00s Davies shot and produced a trilogy of 3-channel documentaries focused on her friend Sam Miller's Triangle Arts Project, a process-based exchange of contemporary dancers in Indonesia, Japan, and USA. Each section of the trilogy, titled Traditions, Inventions, and Exchange, premiered individually with a unique performance featuring dancers from the documentary.
In 1998 Davies began using live video mixes to show multiple angles of Motley's dance performances. The first such piece was Drawing from The Body, in which the movements and choices of the two camera operators became a dynamic augmentation to the performances of Davies and Motley. From this point on, most of their performances would feature live camera feeds.
In the early 2010s Davies worked with Motley and Philip Roy to develop Video Portraits, a performance protocol for a solo dancer. A live camera feed is projected behind the dancer as they perform a solo. That recording is then replayed as the dancer performs a duet with their past self, and this live feed is recorded as well. Finally, the dancer performs as a trio with their two past selves, forming an incrementally organic dance structure. that works as a performance, and then stands alone as a record of performance once the dancer exits.
She is on the board of directors of the non-profit, multi-disciplinary art and performance space, The Kitchen.[2]
Her works in the field of film, multimedia and video installations have been presented at festivals and museums around the world.[3]
