Deborah Hay: The Outlier as Insider

I was raised with the idea of right and wrong being
very clear. In Deborah Hay’s world there is no
right and wrong—it’s all centered on being open
and aware of possibilities. Looking back on when I
got to know her, in my early twenties, I count that
as when I really started living life. I took a five-week
workshop with her in the Netherlands at the
European Dance Development Center, and later
relocated to Seattle specifically to take another. In
witnessing how she puts her beliefs into practice
as an artist, and into action as a person, it was a
huge relief to me. I learned that the world is so
many different shades of gray.

Hay’s choreography is at its heart very practical,
and is designed to force people out of their
habits. She creates sets of instructions categorized
as “1) impossible to realize, 2) embarrassing to ‘do’
or idiotic to contemplate, 3) maddeningly simple”;
and asks questions that are “1) unanswerable, 2)
impossible to truly comprehend, and, at the same
time, 3) poignantly immediate.” In workshops,
she tells students to “find inspiration in what you
see,” a command that gets a bit more explanation
in her work The Match: “It is possible to remove
the tyranny of having to create original and
unique movement if the performer understands
that the question pertains to how one perceives
rather than what one perceives.” That relief from
the burden of trying to be original is one of the
greatest things I’ve found in her work. If you see
someone else bending forward, you might want
to bend forward, too. If you feel like reaching
out, you reach out. The demand to come up with
something unique is actually quite different from
being truly creative; playing only to originality
only limits your options.

Related to that notion of how we perceive is
another of Hay’s seemingly simple instructions:
“Turn your fucking head.” That could be a basic,
everyday ideal about being observant of the world
around us. But in applying it to choreography,
Hay is going directly against the way dancers
are trained: to face the audience, look ahead, and
imitate forms. Traditionally, dancers are vehicles
of transmission for choreographers, literally
embodying their directions, their wishes. So if you
really are not supposed to see what’s on either side
of you, what happens when you do?

One might also ask: Why the profanity? It’s
partly a way to indicate that her practice is not
sacred, because in so many ways it seems like it
should be. While some use curse words to avoid
the complexities of language, Hay uses them to
energize or embellish those complexities. In this
sense, cursing is about being expressive. And it
can touch on humor, too. I love watching her expressions
as she watches dancers. She might wince
and look appalled, as if she’s thinking, “Oh no, you
didn’t!” and then suddenly she looks delighted:
“Oh yes, you DID!” She encourages performers to
go somewhere “wrong,” and then discover how it’s
actually right–or, to be more precise, all right.
That can imply that Hay’s choreography is
based on improvisation, but it’s not, even though
it’s about being open to a process. I see performing
her work as akin to playing basketball. You’re
bound by rules, but you’ve also got strategies,
goals, and formulas, and you must be alert to
opportunities. She builds vision, psychology, and
language into an ongoing series of experiments,
which generate amazing experiences with both
dancers and audiences. In this sense, she is a true
interdisciplinary artist, one who goes beyond
movement or technique.

Hay’s work in dance goes back 50 years to her
cofounding of the Judson Dance Theater in
New York’s Greenwich Village, along with Steve
Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, and others.
During her time with Judson, from 1962 to
1966, the group was challenging dogma around
modern dance by working collectively–which
sounds run-of-the-mill today but was truly radical
at that time–and by including visual artists,
poets, musicians, and filmmakers. During this
time Hay also toured with the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company when its artistic director was
Robert Rauschenberg, who was known for using
the detritus of everyday life in his own art and in
his stage sets for Cunningham. Her marriage to
another visual artist, Alex Hay (his giant paper
bag and cash register slip from the 1960s were on
view in the recent Walker exhibition Lifelike), created
an additional link among these key influences
drawn from the commonplace, visual perception,
and movement. It was a vibrant time for artists
of multiple disciplines to be working and experimenting
together and, as Hay has said, “trying to
shock the shit out of each other.”

In 1970, she and several other members of
the Judson Dance Theater decamped to rural
Vermont. Hay literally burned everything–she
has no archives from before that year–to go live
off the land. In a barn heated by a wood stove,
with nothing left except her own body, she began
a solo practice. Essentially, she flew under the
radar, and in the process created an entirely new,
grassroots way of teaching and performing dance.
She developed a network of other dancers and
choreographers who were also looking for alternatives
to imitation and repetition and classical technique.
They became hugely loyal fans of Hay, who,
in a sense, became a dance world version of a Zen
master. She provides directions, a score, and those
sets of “impossible tasks” and questions. From
there, she gives up a certain power as a choreographer:
in the moment, onstage, the performers are
making the choreographic choices.

The result is dance that buzzes with a distinctive,
vibrational energy. Where most choreographers
carve space and time like an architect,
using bodies as material, she creates a heightened,
almost molecular awareness of space and time itself.
And where those dancers traditionally rely on
timing and movement to avoid colliding with each
other–remember, they’re supposed to be looking
ahead–in Hay’s work they use their own vision.
Rather than moving pieces of architecture, they
act as filters for those space/time molecules.
These differences are Hay’s response to an art
form that, in many ways, seems stretched to its
limits. Choreographers create extremes of movement,
feats of athleticism, and technical precision;
dancers achieve amazing levels of artistic
perfection, performing at once in the moment and
also with their own sense of spontaneity. They
have the skill to push the choreography, as actors
do with the words of a playwright or screenwriter.
But even a transcendent performance still holds
true to what the choreographer or the writer has
prescribed. The variables–movement set to music
in space–have not changed.

Hay’s exploding of these traditions has been
recognized in the past few years by William
Forsythe, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and
other top choreographers around the world. She
had a breakthrough in 2004 with The Match,
an ensemble for four specific performers whose
experience and expertise matched her own: Ros
Warby, Wally Cardona, Chrysa Parkinson, and
Mark Lorimer. Their interpretations of Hay’s choreography–
which won a Bessie (New York Dance
and Performance) Award later that year–opened a
window on The Match’s dazzling complexity, and
also on a way for professional performers to push
dance in new directions.

Hay’s career has since taken off and this year
she was part of the inaugural class of 21 Doris
Duke Artists–an unprecedented initiative of
the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in which
honorees, through peer review, are awarded for
“exceptional creativity, ongoing self-challenge,
and the continuing potential to make significant
contributions to their fields in the future.”

I’ve seen dancers freak out as they prepare to
perform Hay’s work. She is asking you to be in
the moment, to rid yourself of habit, to reveal
yourself. Her mantra is “invite being seen.”
There’s so much purity and generosity to it and
yet psychologically, it can be harrowing. One of
the best examples of this comes with “Charles”
in The Match—a role that all the dancers trade
off performing. There comes a moment when
you, as Charles, are at the center of the stage,
instructed to “produce an incantation, not a plea”
to draw forth the other three performers from
the sides. An incantation implies a wholehearted,
really big spiritual moment, something you can
only achieve by emptying yourself. The other
performers must wait for this before the piece
can continue. The audience also waits, and you as
the performer wait to summon this foolishness,
this letting yourself go. But you are not the judge
of whether this moment has authentically been
fulfilled; your peers are.

The waiting might continue, and you might
feel like you’re failing and yet there’s no spite or
malice, it’s done out of love and a striving for some
kind of authenticity. It becomes clear to everyone–
dancers and the audience–why this is an incantation,
not a plea. Hay doesn’t want bargaining,
she wants the release when the others are finally
drawn in and the piece moves on. Performing this
is one kind of intensity, but watching it is also one
of the most intense experiences you can have. It
absolutely galvanizes everyone, and in doing so,
goes far beyond dance.