- Home
- Wesleyan Dance
- performing arts
- Using the Sky
Visionary experimental choreographer explores her process through language
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.
Preface • Foreword, by Kristy Edmunds • Introduction • Chapter 1 • CHAPTER 2 • A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty • Chapter 3 • Chapter 4 • CHAPTER 5 • If I Sing to You • Chapter 6 • CHAPTER 7 • No Time to Fly • Chapter 8 • CHAPTER 9 • my choreographed body • Chapter 10 • Afterword • Index of Dances, 2000-2015 • Acknowledgements • Notes on Text • Photo credits and drawings • References
DEBORAH HAY is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and teacher working in the field of postmodern dance and one of the founding members of the Judson Dance Theater. She is the artistic director of the Deborah Hay Dance Company, based in Austin, Texas.
"Using the Sky weaves together a series of questions, thoughts, and actions aimed at stepping, literally and figuratively, into the unknowable."
~Didier Morelli, The Drama Review
"Hay reassures her readers that this question is 'unknowable' but that at the same time 'the process of entering into the question was transformative' although she 'could not say how' (2015:17). I think about parallels with faith, another practice which (although I don't have one) is both, it seems, unknowable and transformative. It's this conundrum which is the lightning bolt from Using the Sky. 'What if'—a real Hay-ism—one can be so dedicated to one's movement practice, so inexhaustibly curious about it all, and yet at the same time be seemingly ready to challenge, acknowledge its banality, to let it go?"
~Rachel Gildea, Oxford Dance Writers blog