Mover and a shaker

on contemporary dance and her name will keep

recurring, like a touchstone. For

Siobhan Davies is one of our true creative markers: a maker of resonantly individual dance who is also a part of British contemporary dance history - and she has still to reach her own half-century!

Sue - Siobhan is a stage name, rarely used in daily life - laughingly demurs at the notion of being seen as the Grande Dame of Contemporary Dance. ''I suppose it's because I'm still here,'' she says, with fine amusement. ''To anyone who has come into dance in the last 10 years - and let's face it, that means masses of dancers, and critics - then some of us are

. . . well, some of us have been around from the conception, haven't we? Which is '67 . . .''

She's referring to the breakthrough days of the London School of Contemporary Dance where, in the late sixties, she was one of the first ever students. There, under the aegis of Robert Cohan, Sue - and another illustrious contemporary, Richard Alston - were introduced to Graham technique, and rebelled. Explored Cunningham instead, but mostly set about doing their own thing.

It's a piquant thought - and one that doesn't escape her - that today's self-appointed rebels wouldn't have their establishment to kick against if Sue and Richard and one or two other restless spirits, hadn't helped establish a new British dance scene to begin with.

Not that Sue Davies ever sits back and rests on past triumph. The awards - the Fulbright in 1986, the two Olivier, the Prudential and Bagnolet both in 1996 to name but a handful - may crowd, impressively, into her company biog, but ''they don't actually

add anything to our fee'', she

says dryly.

''The best thing about them is they draw attention to dance as an art form and yes, it is rather nice to be recognised. But I tend to think of it as a company thing, rather than just me.'' The real reward, it seems, is being able to get into the studio, with her family of trusted dancers, as often as finances allow.

If I tried to pin down what it is that motivates her work - characters it, too - then, increasingly, I come back to her sense of joy and wonderment in humankind. Time and again her work has been labelled ''cool''. The connotations are all tinged with a sense of considered distance that favours abstraction above feeling or emotion. But, in truth, it is this ''distance'' - a process of stepping back to achieve perspective, focus - that allows her choreography to explore not just the diversity and potential of the physical body, but the complexity of our innermost being.

''I'm all for understanding feeling,'' she says, speaking now with rapid intensity. ''But why not use the intellect? Enjoy it, revel in it. Revel in the fact that human beings are capable of brilliant abstract thinking. It's one of our distinguishing features - so what's the problem? It's something that I think dance embraces particularly well. One moment you're being utterly human - then within seconds, that very same person can be representing dynamics, space, timing, pattern. And I think that's fabulous.'' And she does too, you can hear it in her voice.

That same energetic delight in stretching dance - and the onlooker's experience of it - surfaces again when we talk about one of the pieces on the current double bill. 88 (and no, the title is not intended as a celebratory reminder of this company's tenth anniversary) is set to various piano studies by Conlan Nancarrow and performed, live, as intended on a player piano. The music is, she agrees, quite a challenge for audiences as well as dancers.

''It is, absolutely, a very insistent sound. Very physical. There's no mercy, no breath. The blood of it is very different from other piano music. The speed of it, literally, takes the breath away. It's a speed which we cannot, and must not, match. Though I should say that we haven't used only the fast ones - there's a Spanish one which is very sensuous, very lovely, and a blues. But then you get a run of speed that is just so exciting. You're thinking, 'what part of the body can possibly work at this speed'. And the only part that really does, of course, is the mind!

''Now you may turn round, because of the mathematical structure of the music, and say that it brings out an inhumane quality to the work - though I have never quite understood that, myself, because human beings are the only creatures that do maths . . . so it's one of the most enormously human qualities!''

You feel, in a way that her choice of this challenging music - indeed her habit of squeezing tight budgets to commission new scores from cutting-edge composers like Gavin Bryars and Kevin Volans - is one of the ways in which she strives to keep dance evolving and developing at the same forward rate as other art forms.

Even though the past century has witnessed radical change on many dance fronts - she lists Graham, Diaghilev, Balanchine as forces for change - Sue Davies still feels that there's a vast territory still to be explored, enjoyed. ''People, in general, don't think of themselves as movers. They don't think of life in terms of movement - so I think they can be quite shocked by what can be revealed in movement. Things that don't come to them through literature or other images and that's also something that's uncharted. It's not just the dance, but how it affects the observer. It's a very old art form - but I think we've lost it a little. Me? Oh I'm trying my damnedest to do something that says look - this is a remarkable art form!'' Indeed she is, with wit and invention, commitment and above all an open-hearted, open-minded concern for humanity itself.

n The Siobhan Davies Dance Company presents its tenth anniversary programme at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre tonight and tomorrow at 7.30pm.