Using the Sky

A Dance

Deborah Hay

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• ISBN:
  9780819579737
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Deborah Hay is an internationally renowned dance artist whose unique approach to bodily practice has had lasting impact on American choreography. Her commitment to dance as a process is as exquisite as it is provoking. Rooted in NYC's 1960s experimental Judson Dance Theater in New York, Hay's work has evolved through experimentation with a use of language that is unique to dance. This book is an exploration and articulation of Hay's process, focusing on several of her most recent works.

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 based on removing anything resembling symmetry from my dances.

I point to the second line of the three listed on the large pad of paper. A discontinuity of continuity provides avenues for experimentation that lead to personal insight impossible to realize without risk-taking. It is a necessary step in understanding the power of choice and the recognition of one’s limitations. A discontinuity of continuity can also be dangerous, and I have a great example of that.

About ten years ago, I wanted to see if I could unlearn an involuntary action and decided upon sneezing. I never told anyone I was doing this. It wasn’t until two years into this experiment that I noticed an annoying itch on the inside corner of my left eye every time I blew my nose. I realized I had ruptured a once-secure membrane that was probably created for the sole purpose of preventing nose blowers from subsequent eye itchiness. I am certain the rupture was a direct result of the fairly violent eruptions within my sinus cavity every time a sneeze happened. And some time later, following a workshop in Brussels at which I remember sneezing a lot, I was dining in a fancy airport hotel the evening before returning to Austin. My jaw locked while I was spooning French onion soup to my mouth. I returned to my room immediately. During the flight home the next day, without much range of movement in my jaw, I panicked, trying to place my head near the retractable tray in order to eat. After getting home, I immediately went to my dentist to be fitted for a bite guard, which eventually caused painful stiffness in my neck. The bite guard was soon in the garbage, and with the help of a massage therapist my normal jaw activity resumed, along with a commitment to return to my God-given right to sneeze. A dear friend, who never knew about my experiment, recently told me that on some occasions in local restaurants I would sneeze with such appalling sounds and spray that she considered not dining out with me again.

Pointing to a continuity of discontinuity, I say, “How I arrived here is the context for my talk.”

Until the age of twenty-five I held these beliefs about myself:

Dance technique was not something I could bring myself to master. My intellect, my thinking mind, was fallow.

I did not know how, nor was I motivated, to engage in research. To this day, I do not know how to use a library.

Ten years later, paralleling the decentralization of my three-dimensional body into a cellular one whenever I danced, I had unintentionally replaced the need to master a way of moving with a body that was now a site for inquiry. Dance became a way for me to learn without thinking, which in turn diminished my fear of not being smart. The attraction to and the determination to keep noticing my cellular body as my teacher showed no sign of weakening. If methodology or attainment were my goal, there would be a fundamental absurdity to my research. How could noticing feedback from five million or a zillion cells possibly compute? How would I even do it? Without a technique to master or a predictable outcome to my dancing, the only evidence I had to support my research was the fact that I continued to learn from my practice. And I became a smarter performer, in that there were aggregates of instances within any given performance when I was not governed by learned behavior.

EXCERPTS FROM DANCE NOTES, 2000–2001

This adaptation of my talk contains excerpts from my dance notes, more or less in chronological order since January 2000. The format conveys how my practice of performance brought me to an understanding of my work as I describe it now, and I point to the continuity of discontinuity material on the easel. There is some repetition because it took years to adapt what I was learning into my daily practice of dance.

It may help to give an example of what I experience as feedback from my zillion-celled body when I am dancing: “Kjdfv hrtrjtwnr. Litjw hc; rt3, tfkgnu6t. Ejl.”

What is not included in this adaptation is a forty-minute video of dancer/choreographer Jeanine Durning performing her early adaptation of the solo No Time to Fly. That video would begin right now, projected on a large screen behind me. There would be just enough volume to hear Jeanine’s footsteps and her singing.

January 2000: What struck me most was how clearly Misha (Mikhail Baryshnikov) stated that he was a dancer, not a choreographer, and that his work was to serve the choreographer. I would like to have had the presence of mind to respond to him by saying that I, as the choreographer, could best be served by his feeling served by the choreography. The word “serve,” used by Misha in 2000, became integral to my personal practice in 2014.

Past/Forward was the re-creation of several dances by choreographers associated with Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, including the commissioning of new works from those choreographers. I choreographed Single Duet, which Misha and I performed during the US leg of the tour.

I did not think that he really ever understood how I worked, yet when I looked at some of the videos of the duet, I much preferred watching him. When he looked at me dancing, his blue eyes penetrated every detail of my movement, and I associated that look with how he learned from his dance teachers as a young boy. He always wanted me to go onstage first because he said that if he could see me, he could then follow.

Most dance training assumes that there is a single coherent being who dances. My work succeeds when there is no single “one,” no single moment, or meaning, movement, image, character, emotion, that exists long enough for either the dancer or audience to identify an “is” that is happening.

If I remove movement as the primary component of dance making, can the ways I perceive space and time suffice as material within the choreography and performance of my work?

For many years it was my surrounding space that I perceived changing as I moved. Gradually my experience of perception enlarged to include the whole studio or theater in which I was dancing. This expanded field increased the material available to me as I danced. Why do I need to limit myself to what I am doing in space when I can include my perception of the outer reaches of that space in my dancing? There is nothing abstract in how I experience space and time. On the contrary, I am alert to my whole body’s sensual mutability.

How I perceive my bodily experience of time passing feels like lying still between the banks of a shallow moving river.

I set up a proposition in the form of a “what if ?” question. The question is framed through a turn of language found to excite the imagination of the person who is dancing. The question is meant to inspire and engage the dancer in noticing the sensuality of the feedback from the question as it unfolds in his/her cellular body. The question is not there to be answered. And, to not look for an answer requires a lot of work for everyone. That is why the question has to be so attractive for the person who is dancing: “[N]on-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge” (Bachelard 1994, xxii, quoting Jean Lescure, Lapique [Paris: Galanis], 78).

The group piece I choreographed for the Past/Forward project was titled Whizz. The primary question the dancers were to engage in their practice was, “What if every cell in your body at once has the potential to perceive your loyalty to DANCE, and your disinterestedness (in the loyalty) simultaneously?” Disinterestedness referred to loyalty and nothing else. (This question, among other things, helps to undermine “the look” of the serious artist.)

As Marian Chase Lecturer, I began my talk by barking for one minute at a podium before an audience at the American Dance Therapy Association in Seattle, Washington, in October 2000:

“Woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof Woof WOOFWOOF Woof Woof woof woof woof WOOF WOOF woof woof woof woof WOOF WOOF woof woof woof woof woof woof WOOF woof woof woof WOOF.”

Within the art form we call dance, I experiment with words to disrupt, often violently, conscious and unconscious movement behavior. “What if alignment is everywhere?” or “What if where I am is what I need?” or “What if my will is my destiny?”

Barking, too, has had a transforming effect on my career as a choreographer, performer, and teacher. I was influenced by a Dutch actress, one soloist among a class of performance artists who were studying with Marina Abramovic during a conference entitled “The Connected Body” at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam in the early 1990s. The actress presented her work in a stairwell alcove between two floors. I sat on the steps looking down into her shielded glass enclosure. Other people were using the stairwell to pass from one showing to another, and some stopped to watch her briefly. I stayed. She was nude and had the flawless body of a tall, thin thirty-year-old. When she moved it was on all fours: loping, pacing, stretching, attacking, protecting, watching us, or lying down and panting.

At times she stood on hind legs to paw at the walls in protest. She barked, growled, moaned. She was not acting. Her whole body was dog—flesh, bones, essence. I remember thinking that I had never seen “dog” before seeing her “dog.”

I have friends who own several Labradors. Early one morning during a visit to their home in Louisiana, my ritual cup of coffee in hand, we sat on a patio that opened onto acres of pecan orchard. First he, then she, then both, for more than an hour, threw sticks into the orchard for the three dogs to fetch. The sticks were then wrestled from their dripping jaws, only to be thrown into the orchard and fetched again. It was clear that the dogs would not be the first to stop playing. I remember thinking that this was the most wretched way to have my morning coffee.

I did not grow up with a dog, so it was almost thirty years into my professional life before I realized I had in fact trained myself to be a good dog in relation to my master/my body, my teacher.

My devotion to the practice of dance is similar to the Labs’ to the game. The Labs’ attention is on the master’s whole body, the energy being summoned: the force behind the throwing arm, the moment the stick leaves the hand, and the direction the stick is aimed. When I go into the studio, my attention is on my whole body in response to a set of conditions I set out to explore in the course of my work that day. I am poised, in a metaphorical sense, at the feet of my body, my teacher. My tongue c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Presume My Story Exaggerates
• 2 A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty
• 3 Nothing Is Fixed/An Absence Within the Order of Things
• 4 The Story Is Me
• 5 If I Sing to You
• 6 What If There Is Here/And Then Is Gone?
• 7 No Time to Fly
• 8 There Are Many/I Want One Entry/On Target/Without an Arrow
• 9 my choreographed body
• 10 Figure a Sea Using the Sky
• Afterword
• Index of Dances, 2000–2016
• References
• About the Author