(1996): chapter 3
FIRE (1999): chapter 12
foreword Susan Leigh Foster
Introducing Deborah Hay’s body-as-Buddhist. Such an agile body, capable of lightning-quick transformations—floppy then precise, always deft, full of buffoonery and deadly serious in its commitment to each gesture. It gallops, swaggers, tip-toes, and falls gently backward into the embrace of space. Scrambling or gliding to standing, it grimaces. The softest leaps, the most preposterous gestures, it happily cavorts before slowing to stillness, a dynamic tranquillity. The flexibility, the unpredictability of its attitudes draw us toward it. It gazes back at those who view it with a generous invitation to be looked at.
This body, it is proposed, practices a religion renowned for its skeptical stance toward religion. It performs as teacher, oracle, and companion in the investigation, not of spirituality, but of consciousness itself. Alternately a corporeal provocateur that poses the question of consciousness and the medium through which the investigation of consciousness takes shape, the Buddhist body moves matter-of-factly through its day.
Hay has cultivated this body, discovered and rediscovered it over many years of dancing. In training to make and perform dances, she attends to the body’s changeability. She explores the ramifications of multiple, distinctive metaphorical framings of physicality. Body, in turn, has offered a kind of dialogue—probing, assessing, reacting, and instigating—in response to Hay’s various queries. Close and consistent attentiveness to this dialogue forms the basis of Hay’s regimen for learning to dance and also generates the motional matter from which her dances are made. For Hay, choreography emerges from her ongoing reflections about bodiliness.
My Body, The Buddhist documents this generative play between corporeality and consciousness and between the dance of everyday life and dance as a theatrical practice. The text’s non-narrative account of a choreographer’s daily work mingles descriptions of living, training, creating, and performing so as to illuminate the integral relation between artistic vision and the daily pursuit of that vision. Fleshing out the body’s “daringly ordinary perspicacity,” she sustains the quizzical, illusive maverickness of body even as she illumines corporeal existence through her descriptions of it.
ALTERNATIVE ARTISTRY
As a dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a participant in the Judson Dance Theater performances, an independent choreographer located in Austin, Texas, and as world-touring performer and teacher, Hay has elaborated a powerful alternative dancing practice. She is continuously upheaving our assumptions about dance and the body. She shows us how interesting stillness is, and how quickly physical commitment can change from one action, persona, or image to another. Her dances elaborate a theatricality that appears pedestrian, intimate, and casual one minute while filled with wonderment, alterity, and sumptuousness the next. Above all, her work invites us to laugh at our own seriousness and take in the dancing seriously, both at the same time. Hay’s sustained dedication to alternative choreographic values such as these is an extraordinary achievement, especially during this era of lack of support, monetary and otherwise, for the arts.
During the 1960s, when Hay came of age as an artist, art-making was one of several alternative cultural practices through which mainstream values were critically interrogated. Works by Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Eleo Pomare, and the Judson choreographers all pushed at the boundaries of acceptable dance movement and introduced alternative vocabularies and stagings for danced performance. One of the results of their efforts has been to make evident the specificity of the relationship between technical competence and choreographic vision. Unlike ballet, where standard criteria of evaluation and a universalist ideal of expertise are developed, Hay and others of her generation have proposed projects that require radically alternative sets of physical skills. Unlike modern dance pioneers such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, whose vocabularies seemed to issue from pan-human psychic dynamics, choreographers from the 1960s shifted the focus away from psychological origins and toward the physical matter of dance-making. Their work demonstrates how each new choreographic project requires special skills and hence special training in order for the dancer to acquire those skills.
Hay’s work exemplifies a radical and fully realized vision of this kind of alternative training program and choreography. Many contemporary choreographers blur or obscure the ways that training inculcates aesthetic values by working with pick-up companies whose dancers acquire an amalgamation of dance styles, such as release work, contact improvisation, and ballet. Hay, instead, nurtures the relationship between her approach to dance training and performance, and she stands by its integrity. As a result, her dances look entirely unique and so do the dancers who perform them.
Hay has pursued her alternative artistic practice as both choreographer and teacher. From 1980 to 1995 Hay conducted a series of large group workshops in Austin, Texas, each meeting daily for a period of three to four months and culminating in performances of an evening-length work developed over the course of the workshop. Here again, Hay’s commitment to the intrinsic connection between learning dancing and making dances is evident. Hay organized each workshop around the exploration of a specific theme, and then allowed the dance to develop from the daily practice of this theme. Rather than instruct students in a standard repertoire of technical skills and then proceed to fashion a dance, Hay organizes both the acquisition of technique and the choreography around a focused inquiry into bodiliness.
Hay’s workshops have made the most brilliant dancers better dancers, but they have had equal relevance for people in other professions. Architects, therapists, writers, and construction workers have all participated in these annual gatherings. Here a heterogeneous alternative group of individuals gains bodily eloquence, perceptual acuity, and collective sensibilities that enrich the Austin community and the international dance world. The workshops carry forward the 1960s impulse to include all bodies in dancing, to claim that all bodies can dance, yet they deepen that impulse by requiring such a powerful commitment to the process of physical inquiry.
Hay’s alternative artistry has challenged general assumptions about what dance is, and she has also turned its critical reflexivity toward her own artistic practice. My Body, The Buddhist witnesses Hay’s willingness to examine the limits of her own artistic practice. In one instance, she recounts her abhorrence at the thought of making a dance to a specific piece of music, her sudden awareness of the strict limits this has placed on her own choreography, and her reluctant resolve to embark on the project. Rarely do we glimpse the role of this kind of instrospective reflection in the process of art-making. Hay’s staging of the dialogue between body and consciousness generously allows us to view it from many perspectives.
My Body, The Buddhist describes the development of several recent works, focusing especially on how the dances issue from Hay’s daily dialogue with body. Hay’s previous book, Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance, documents the process of creating and producing a single evening-length work developed during one of her large group workshops. In it Hay recounts her responses to the distinctive physicalities of individual participants and the staging of those bodies as characters and actions. Alongside this discussion of bodies and movement, she reports the negotiations concerning a performance space, costuming, scenery, and lighting that are entailed in the mounting of any production. The juxtaposition of these different aspects of dance-making provides an invaluable perspective on how an artist lives and works in these times. My Body, The Buddhist continues this chronicle of an artist’s work, yet it looks more introspectively at the relationship between a choreographer’s daily movement practice and choreographed performance, and it illuminates the dancer’s constant and daily attentiveness to body’s articulateness.
“WHERE I AM IS WHAT I NEED, CELLULARLY”
One
