Deborah Hay Dance Company Newsletter

Wonderful Honor Ahead

2009-02-16T14:34:00.000-08:00

In October 2009 the Theater Academy in Helsinki, Finland, will confer on Deborah Hay an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Dance at the Doctoral Degrees Graduation Ceremony.

Up Until Now, premiere 1/29/09 Toronto Dance Theatre

2008-12-23T11:55:00.000-08:00

photo:Christopher House and Deborah Hay
Christopher House, artistic director of Toronto Dance Theatre commissioned a new work for his 11- member dance company. I will begin work with the company on January 5. The dance, titled Up Until Now, will premiere on January 29, 2009 at the Winchester Street Theatre in Toronto.

Up Until Now is based on material from I’ll Crane For You, the solo I taught at the 2008 Solo Performance Commissioning Project. The title I’ll Crane For You is the last line of a spontaneous song I sang and recorded in a field of snow in Stowe,VT , February 28, 2007.
“I think through far
I pray for you
I think for you
I’ll go and then I’ll crane for you “

During the 2008 SPCP I realized that “I’ll crane for you” is also a metaphor for the performer/audience relationship.

Christopher learned I’ll Crane For You at the 2008 SPCP so I asked him to teach his company the solo material, including the questions used to challenge the dancer’s attachment to known material. Because Christopher and I have worked together in an earlier SPCP, I felt confident in asking him to set the stage for my brief tenure with his company.

How I Practice Relationship

2008-07-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

July 30, 2008
Outside of the studio I assume I am in relationship to the world, but I do not pay attention to how I am being altered by it. Call it self-protective or call it loss.

I have come to realize that dance is how I actually exercise my relationship to the world. As I perform in the studio or on stage, I try, like a dog, to notice and balance concurrent perceptual experiences:
a) my relationship to the feedback from my whole body at once;
b) my relationship to the entire space in which I am dancing;
c) my relationship to each moment as it unfolds;
d) my relationship to the other people with whom I am dancing; and,
e) my relationship to the audience.

Found Music, premiere, Marfa, TX

2008-07-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

July 19, 2008 premiere Found Music, at Goode Crowley Theater, Marfa, TX
dancers: Cydney Wilkes and Mike Barber

How do I recognize my choreography?

2007-12-03T14:53:00.000-08:00

The Solo Performance Commissioning Project began in 1998 at the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, in the town of Langley, WA. It took place for ten days annually for five summers before it was relocated to the Findhorn Foundation Community in Scotland in 2004 where it has since been administered by Gill Clarke and staff from Independent Dance in London and by Karl Jay-Lewin of Bodysurf Scotland, at Findhorn.

Of the eight SPCPs that have taken place, about 140 solo adaptations have been realized. I have been an audience member at only a few public performances. It is at these public showings, however, that I am coming to learn what
Choreography: Deborah Hay
Adaptation and Performance: [example: Lindsay Doe]
means. This is how the credits appear when an adaptation is being performed.

What I mean by my choreography includes the transmission from me to the dancer, of the same set of questions I ask myself when I am performing a particular movement sequence that ministers shape to a dance. I will not talk about my movement choices here, except to say that as an aspect of my choreography they fall almost exclusively into three categories: 1) impossible to realize, 2) embarrassing to “do”, or, idiotic to contemplate, 3) maddeningly simple. These movement directions are not unlike my questions that are 1) unanswerable, 2) impossible to truly comprehend, and, at the same time, 3) poignantly immediate.

History choreographs all of us, including dancers. The choreographed body dominates most dancing, for better or for worse. The questions that guide me through a dance are like the tools one would use for renovating an already existing house. Like a screwdriver being turned counter-clockwise, or a crow bar prying boards free from a wall, the dancer applies the questions to re-choreograph his/her perceived relationship to him/herself, the audience, space, time, and the instantaneous awareness of any of these combined experiences. The questions help uproot behavior that gathers experimentally and/or experientially.

When I see a singularly coherent choreographed body, performing a solo adaptation, I know that the dancer is not choosing to exercise the re-measuring tools needed to counter-choreograph the predominance of learned behavior. I use the words “choosing to exercise” because most of us know exactly what is required when we choose to train the physical body to adapt to a choreographer’s aesthetics. Training oneself in a questioning process that counter-choreographs the learned body requires similar devotion and constancy.

Every dancer who learns one of my solo dances, signs a contract, committing to a minimum three months of practice before the first public performance of his/her solo adaptation. Three months is not an estimate. It is based on my experience with new material. In order to recognize all the ways I hold onto ideas, images, suppositions, beliefs, the ways my body attaches to what I think the material ‘is’, or should feel like, or look, I need to be alone in a studio, noticing the infinitely momentary feedback that arises from my daily performance of a reliable sequence of movement directions, influenced by the immediacy arising from the same questions day after day after day.

I recognize my choreography when I see a dancer’s self-regulated transcendence of his/her choreographed body within in a movement sequence that distinguishes one dance from another.
Deborah Hay, 2007