The Play of Dance: An Introduction to "Lamb, Lamb, Lamb, Lamb, Lamb,..."

Abstract

At 50, Deborah Hay is one of the few original postmodern choreographers still actively exploring an antitechnical aesthetic. While the likes of Trisha Brown, David Gordon, and Twyla Tharp have turned to increasingly virtuosic dancers and movement styles, Hay is still interested in the aesthetics of the lived-rather than the mastered-body. She still exists (both literally-in Austin, Texas-as well as metaphorically) at the margins of the art, refusing to buy into the conventional standards of beauty that have reentered the field in the last decade. She simply has eliminated that kind of hierarchy from her vocabulary. By calling 'dance' we are then making a judgment about stuff we are not calling 'dance.' I have an unquenchable thirst to present that area of movement not recognized as dance-to pull it back into the world of dance (I990). The choreographer's model remains John Cage, whose insistence that anything-including noise and silence-could be music, revolutionized the fate of late-twentieth-century art. Hay grew up in Brooklyn, feeding on the Rockettes and the New York City Ballet. She did indeed learn to well enough to join the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in I964, but soon quit that in favor of the avantgarde community of the Judson Dance Theatre. She discovered in its fondness for nontrained performers a whole new world of possibilities. She never took another class (it felt limiting); instead, she explored tai chi chuan, whose centered, grounded, smooth way of moving is still rec-