Postmodern dancer Deborah Hay to be honored at UT Austin
Every single day ought to be Deborah Hay Day.
The postmodern performer is Austin’s reward to the worldwide dance scene, at occasions seen extra usually overseas than at house.
Because of Texas Performing Arts, in partnership with the Ransom Heart, nevertheless, longtime followers of this dance idol — in addition to the merely curious — can spend just about all day with Hay on Jan. 28, via performances, talks, a movie known as “Pricey Dancer” and a foyer exhibit of posters and different ephemera on the McCullough Theatre on the College of Texas campus.
Large bonus: At age 81, Hay, who has earned numerous awards, grants and commissions — she even created a duet for herself and ballet god Mikhail Baryshnikov, and one other piece with musician Laurie Anderson — will carry out solo throughout a night program of her dances introduced by the Swedish firm Cullberg.
As she has performed for the reason that Nineteen Sixties, Hay remains to be creating and recreating materials knowledgeable by philosophy, music, poetry, nature, artwork and, nicely, life.
Hay: “I’m all the time motion and dance via the again door.”
The secrets and techniques of Hay’s technique revealed
Final yr, the Ransom Heart acquired Hay’s archives, 60 packing containers of fabric spanning the complete breadth of her life and profession. Now, students and different members of the general public can peruse the paper path of her virtually seven many years on the world dance scene.
“While you study dance historical past, you do not not know her work,” says Eric Colleary, the Ransom Heart’s curator of performing arts.
In December, I met with Hay in a sunny room on the Ransom Heart, together with Colleary, who occurs to be a former pupil of one among Hay’s former college students.
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Fanned out over a protracted convention desk had been pictures, writings, publicity, posters, clippings and sketches, together with web page after web page of Hay’s notebooks.
There in entrance of my eyes had been the keys to Hay’s singular technique, which I first encountered in 1981, together with simply the best two folks to translate them for me.
“Deborah Hay’s archive is exclusive amongst dance archives,” Colleary wrote when the gathering opened to the general public final yr. “She has persistently documented her work in ways in which transcend the everyday movie recording or press launch. You may see the every day course of and observe of one among dance’s most celebrated choreographers. Partaking along with her archive is a deeply embodied expertise.”
The key is present in her “scores.” These literary texts usually are not notes on the way to reproduce a dance that Hay has made. As an alternative, the writing and artwork are extensions of the performances. Earlier than, throughout and after making a dance, Hay explores concepts, emotions and sensations that flip into questions that inform the motion.
“You may’t do any of this stuff,” Hay remarks as we take a look at varied sketches and phrases on this sampling of scores on paper. “That is deliberate. On this manner every efficiency isn’t the identical.”
The markings at occasions appear random.
“(They’re) not meant to stage the dance once more precisely the identical ceaselessly,” Colleary says. “She sees it an an ‘explainer’ of her work. I’ve by no means seen something prefer it. Typically the notes are printed in this system, however a few of these have by no means been seen earlier than.”
On the Ransom Heart, Hay learn aloud a little bit of attractive poetry she had written in 2007 in Vermont. In a lush, pliant voice that makes one want Hay did as a lot theater as dance, she repeated the road, “If I sing to you,” as if she was calling up an embodiment of feeling and motion. This sort of incantation, in flip, evokes what the physique does.
“I journey lots. When I’m strolling down the road in a wierd metropolis, I quietly sing spontaneous songs to myself,” Hay says. “No matter comes into my thoughts. Later, I’ll write it down.”
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More often than not, the viewers by no means sees the “scores.”
“If I am actually excited a couple of rating — one time I known as it a libretto — I am going to publish it,” Hay says. “They’re little books. Folks can see them: Typically, it appears like poetry, or it appears like prose. … The rating is the previous, current and future.”
A few of Hay’s scores and different papers shall be on show within the foyer of the McCullough Theatre; others will quickly be seen in a small exhibit on the Ransom Heart beginning in February.
Miraculously, particularly for somebody who does historic analysis, Hay data the dates of every part she has written or performed for many years. Hay has written 4 books that specify her method to bop, life and the world round her. Of the worldwide dance greats, hers is among the many greatest documented histories in all facets.
The Hay archives got here to the Ransom Heart in glorious situation, partly as a result of Laurent Pichard, a performer, dance-maker and artist who appeared in one among her works in 2006, began organizing her papers and translating materials seven years in the past. As a Ph.D. pupil, his analysis is carried out as a site-specific artist throughout the work of Deborah Hay.
“He made a large, attractive spreadsheet of every part,” Hay says. “Going via it, I discovered so many surprises — letters to different artists, to folks. Information of performances that I’ve no reminiscence of.”
Earlier than Hay received to Austin
Born Deborah Goldensohn in 1941 in Brooklyn, Hay realized dance from her mom, ballet dancer Shirley Goldensohn.
Her first mentor exterior the house was Invoice Frank, an African American choreographer who not solely created solos and duets for her, but additionally took her dancing at Latin golf equipment.
“My dad and mom by no means knew,'” she advised the American-Statesman in 1999. “I lied.”
In 1961, Hay grew to become fascinated main fashionable dance innovator Merce Cunningham, who created time-space experiments with composer John Cage.
“I might sneak into rehearsals and lie on the ground of the balcony to observe,” she advised the Statesman in 1999. Later, after she joined the troupe, Hay described the dance legend as “terrifying — I all the time fell over when he checked out me.”
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Additionally in 1961, she married Alex Hay, a sculptor and painter. The couple haunted New York artwork galleries crammed with the summary and conceptual works that perplexed a lot of her contemporaries.
“I skilled the artwork on a bodily degree,” Hay advised the Statesman in 1999. “I used to be reworked.”
But she didn’t have the language to explain what was taking place to her.
The couple leapt between artwork and dance. Teamed with buddies, comparable to Texas-born Robert Rauschenberg, they mixed an more and more conceptual and kinetic notion of sculpture with the expressive energy of experimental efficiency.
In 1962, she was one of many co-founders of Judson Dance Theatre, a collective of dancers, composers and artists influenced by John Cage. They carried out at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village.
Hay and different dancers moved away from balletic or fashionable approach and embraced improvising, multimedia and using on a regular basis motion, whereas not ignoring the attributes of agility and coaching.
She attracted extra consideration within the late Nineteen Sixties when she led dozens of untrained of us via actions that to some critics seemed like barely organized chaos, to others like genius.
In 1970, after years of experimenting in New York, she moved to upstate Vermont, the place she distilled her usually sluggish, minimal actions. On the identical time, she used artwork, video and writing to sharpen her perceptions and to encourage what audiences noticed in her performances.
Welome to Texas
In 1976, Hay was invited to carry out one among her dances at a museum in Fort Value, then at Laguna Gloria Artwork Museum, now a part of The Modern Austin.
“I got here all the way down to Texas within the winter, and it was heat,” Hay says with a smile. “I had simply spent seven winters in Vermont. Austin was positively on the radar in 1976. Not a day glided by when the topic of Austin did not come up someplace. I wrote a letter to my artist buddies inviting them to return. I stated: There’s inexpensive housing and you are able to do your work right here.”
In actual fact, Hay labored with skilled and untrained dancers, utilizing a way known as “enjoying awake.” Thus, she reworked the Austin dance scene. Whereas a few of her performances, made acquainted domestically via the Deborah Hay Dance Firm, resembled the sluggish depth of Japanese Noh theater, others flowed like tai chi.
By the late Nineteen Eighties, Austin had grow to be a haven for efficiency artwork, usually a mix of dance, visible artwork and different media. For the uninitiated, these performances at occasions felt fully divorced from the narrative and even the summary types of conventional dance and theater.
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The inherent openness to ambiguity of Hay’s and her followers’ work was not unintentional.
“Her dances embody questions,” Colleary says. “Not only for the dancers, however for everybody current.”
What to anticipate from ‘The Match’
To present you style of what you would possibly see on the afternoon of what I am unofficially calling Deborah Hay Day, here is an excerpt from my assessment of “The Match” — to be revived on Jan. 28 — which ran Jan. 20, 2005:
“After I first noticed Deborah Hay carry out in 1981, she had already been well-known for 20 years. Subsequently, I witnessed a number of solo exhibits by the Austin-based dance artist, an prolonged duet, live shows by lesser Hay acolytes and, in fact, one among her large-group performances.
“Till final week, nevertheless, I had not seen her work fulfilled by dancers who matched Hay’s bodily prowess, expressive density and efficient self-exposure.
“‘The Match,’ a 50-minute quartet adopted by chosen solo variations, represents a breakthrough for an artist who has been breaking via all kinds of perceptual limitations for greater than 4 many years.
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“The outlandish motion included contractions from a large dance vocabulary — fashionable, jazz, clowning, social dance — in addition to on a regular basis motions. (Hay says to reviewers: ‘Do not write in regards to the motion!’ However, hey, it is a part of the dance bundle.)
“Having seen Hay carry out her solo (model) of ‘The Match'” final yr, it was doable to acknowledge structural and spatial markers: sententious phrases, glancing relationships to the viewers at The Off Heart, transitional areas and sounds — largely in a nonsense language.
“But it surely was additionally doable to learn psychological states — passages of vulnerability, of exhibition, of childlike play. These interior workings had been much more evident within the two, shorter variations — ‘The Ridge’ and ‘Wax on Paper,’ carried out by Hay and Mark Lorimer the evening I attended.
“Each had been vivid examples of self-rendering — particularly throughout Lorimer’s plaintive rendition of ‘The place Is Love’ — however the contrasts between the solos had been equally compelling, since Hay’s motion is circumscribed, virtually liquid, whereas Lorimer carried out in bursts of dance exuberance.
“The opposite three quartet dancers had been equally watchable people, inside and outside. After 24 years, I’ve seen Hay as theorist, coach, dance-maker and dancer, lastly, at her greatest.”
A private word
I encourage you to see Hay dance.
It would make you uncomfortable at first. You may not perceive what she is doing.
Simply look. And look nearer.
Early on, I referred to Hay because the “Maria Callas of dance,” not as a result of she embodies the drama of that nice operatic diva, however as a result of each look, each transfer — severe or comedian — is extremely current.
You may’t assist however be absorbed into her world.
As a critic for Dance Journal as soon as wrote: “Nobody on this planet would do this stuff.”
Celebrating Deborah Hay
All actions happen on Jan. 28 on the McCullough Theatre on the College of Texas campus. Tickets price $10-$50. Extra data: texasperformingarts.org.
- 1 p.m. Pre-performance dialog between Deborah Hay and Kirk Lynn, playwright and UT professor
- 2. p.m. Reside efficiency of “The Match” by the Swedish firm Cullberg
- 3 p.m. Put up-performance dialogue moderated by Madge Darlington, UT professor
- 7 p.m. Movie screening of “Pricey Dancer”
- 7:30 pm. Deborah Hay solo, “my choreographed physique … revisited” and U.S. premiere of “Horses, the solos” carried out by Swedish firm, Cullberg
- 9 p.m. Put up-performance dialogue by Leah Cox, UT professor
