into real buddies.
I thank my Vermont-based families, Barry and Lorrie Goldensohn, my brother and sister-in-law, for their early editing support, and the folks at Mad Brook Farm, where I spent three summer months finishing this manuscript and returning to my solo practice in the living room and on the porch of the main house.
Thank you, Alva Nöe, for the phrase “reorganizing ourselves,” which I use in this book.
In Austin, Texas, the Deborah Hay Dance Company board of directors stands by me in ways that I believe none of us yet realize. They are Beverly Bajema, Claudia Boles, Anna Carroll, Will Dibrell, Emily Little, Sherry Smith, and Sydney Yeager. My friend Rino Pizzi has been there in friendship, photography, website management, and help, fixing things I don’t understand. My gratitude also goes to Diana Prechter and Kent Cole, who have helped enhance the DHDC in many logistical ways.
Recent grants/awards have helped free me from the struggle for survival that once shaped the course of every day. I owe profound gratitude to the USA Artists grant in 2010, the 2011 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, the Robert Rauschenberg artist’s residency program 2014, and most especially the 2012 inaugural Doris Duke Artist’s Award Program.
I am indebted to Dana Frank for coming on board with little advance notice. She provided valuable input on the book’s much-needed structural changes.
And finally and without limits is my gratitude to Suzanna Tamminen, editor at Wesleyan University Press. Her constancy remains thorough.
NOTES ON THE TEXT
The essay “My Body, the Archive” was first commissioned by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia. © 2014 The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. All rights reserved.
“A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty” was published in Choreographic Practices 5, no. (2014).
No Time to Fly was self-published in 2010 in Austin, Texas, and in 2013 it was republished as is by CasCo, Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
The letter to Gill Clarke was first published by Routledge Books in a brochure titled “Turn Your F*^king Head.”
introduction
Everyone is consciously and unconsciously choreographed, by culture, gender, locale, politics, race, job, history, and so on. I came to appreciate the art of choreography pretty late in my career as a dance maker. It was 2001. I was with my brother, watching a video of Ros Warby performing her adaptation of my solo Fire, when he reached out his hand to touch my arm and said what I was thinking: “That’s who you want to work with.” Her sympathetic responsiveness to the language I had created to transmit the solo, including her practice of dis-attachment from those very same responses, was astounding. I knew immediately that I wanted to choreograph ensemble work for dancers whose artistic preferences, like Ros’s, inclined toward increasingly subtle instances of insight, irreverence, and revelation. I wanted to choreograph a spoken language that would inspire a shift in dance away from the illustrative body, despite its intense appeal to dancers and audiences alike, to a non-representational body.
Creating language that can potentially stimulate sensually meaningful responses from this cellular entity has been the nature of my work for forty-five years. The translation of this feedback has been the core of my teaching, my personal practice, my experience of performance, and my writing. Yet how one perceives one’s cellular body is a rational, logistic, and analytic conundrum for anyone other than the individual willing to personally experiment with such a body.
My dance practice continues to seek less stable instances of being, and I try to identify those capricious moments through the structure of language, working and reworking that language to best describe the learning taking place in my spewing multidimensional reconfiguring nonlinear embodiment of potentiality.
It is this absurdly coherent information that feeds my attachment to dis-attaching from the posture of a single coherent person who dances.
Or maybe my attraction to overseeing these infinitesimally brief instances of insight is because, as a choreographer and dancer, I am freed from needing to be creative. The surplus of perceived intelligence from my whole body at once far exceeds any additional input from me. My work then becomes how I choose to see while dancing.
In 2013 I presented a performative talk at the TanzKongress in Düsseldorf, Germany. Although I was on a self-imposed sabbatical that year, I accepted the invitation in part because it was where and when the Motion Bank website, also titled Using the Sky, was to be released.
To prepare for the TanzKongress I read through all of my dance journals since 2000, selecting passages that could illustrate how my dance language had evolved over a period of fifteen years. When that compilation was complete, Using the Sky: A Dance had begun.
using the sky
1 presume my story exaggerates
Already drawn on a large white pad elevated on an easel are three separate bodies of information, on three separate sheets of paper, exhibited one at a time. I stand beside the easel and point to my drawing of a horse with a colorful cart being pulled along behind it and say something like, “I am the horse. The cart is my research.”
I lift the paper and turn it over the top of the pad to reveal a second page:
5 million cells and up—1970s
800 billion cells—1990s
More than a zillion cells—NOW
50 billion cells—1980s
50 trillion cells—2000s
“The quantification of my research material is based on published data offered to me by students, Deepak Chopra types, friends, and even family,” I say. Under my breath but loud enough for people to hear, I remark that the list also illustrates the absurdity of my practice. I then fold that sheet of paper over the top of the pad to reveal a final page.
a continuity of continuity
a discontinuity of continuity
a continuity of discontinuity
“This is how I describe the evolution of my dance practice as I understand it now,” I say.
A continuity of continuity is how those of us who are lucky enough begin life. We are hungry, we are fed. We are thirsty and we drink. We need to be held and are lifted into our mother’s arms. We want to dance, and we have Fred and Ginger, or hip-hop, or B Boys for influence. Or we have ballet. If we want to dance differently, we have modern dance teachers to emulate.
FIGURE 1. Continuity drawing. © Deborah Hay, 2014.
Another example of a continuity of continuity is a personal experience of symmetry. Years ago I was performing and teaching as part of a week’s residency at Skidmore College. I was invited to observe students from a dance composition class who were making work based on symmetry. I remember the beauteous feeling of satisfaction that the symmetry evoked as I watched the committed young dancers. A moment later I realized that my entire career was
