Deborah Hay Research Articles

GuiDance of Butterflies: Practicing Ecosomatics and Dancing Towards More Sensitive Bodily Presence and Planetary Feeling

Abstract This research is a multi-sited embodied autoethnography in which I combine methods of multispecies ethnography with the autoethnographic methodology I applied before. This research has been done with butterflies and it seeks planetary feeling through dance, embodied research and ecosomatics. The data of the research was produced in Mexico in 2019 and in Spain in 2021 and 2022. It includes photography, videos, ethnographic field notes and photopaintings. This article investigates how the contact with butterflies can affected to our bodily presence and qualities of movement and dance. I look these findings in relation to ideas and practices of choreographers such as Deborah Hay and Steve Paxton and I elaborate on ecosomatic approach that resonates well with multispecies ethnography. I analyze, how the touch and the dance with butterflies created something similar Hay calls “cellular level presence” and lightness of being. I write about special quality of butterflies dancing with the wind and my dances with the wind. I suggest that sharing spaces and moving respectfully in relation to other species could be inspiring in finding new kind of movement, embodied consciousness and knowledge. These experiences could have therapeutical and healing meanings. I suggest that ecosomatics and ecologically oriented dance art and research noticing the well-being of other species could be important in searching planetary feeling, feeling more deeply our biodiverse planet while same time also working for our own well-being.

Animation Project: Activating life at the periphery

Abstract How do new materialist perspectives for decentring the human, and instead attending to the forces of ‘things’, productively address misalignments between ‘dance’ and ‘choreography’ within Western concert dance? Could the non-human kinetics of ‘thinking-feeling’ be foregrounded in performance and what new tools would be required for dancers and audiences to perceive it? How might dance artists propose frames in which these ‘animating circumstances’ might unfold and be shared as the movement of thought? From 2011 to 2015, artist/scholars Megan Nicely and Kate Elswit explored these questions in a studio practice, stage performance, installation and series of workshops titled Animation Project. The process that this article chronicles brought together various strands of philosophical, embodied thought from the work of João Fiadeiro, Deborah Hay, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning and Jane Bennett.

“[So] What Do Dancers Know, [Anyway]?”: Voicing the Dancer’s Perspective through Emergent Choreographic Analysis

[So] what do dancers know, [anyway]? Part manifesto, part essay, this article presents a woven, multi-level text discussion of my dancer/scholar standpoint and practice-as-research approach to articulating the dancer’s perspective. My recent research develops an emergent choreographic analysis of iconic American dance artist Deborah Hay’s choreography and practice, from my first-person experience as practitioner/performer in her solo “At Once” (2009). Writing as closely as possible to the dancing experience from within the practice, and using phenomenological, critical-poetic and performative writing strategies, this approach involves an iterative practicing, performing, and writing process that echoes the principles of adaptation underlying Hay’s own project. Reflecting Robin Nelson’s proposal that, in PaR, theory is imbricated within practice but must be articulated in complementary writing, I draw on Linda Hutcheon’s definition and principles of adaptation as a tool to amplify the resonances between Hay’s work, my artistic research itself, and the framework for its articulation. I ultimately position my research and writing not as a separate analytical reflection but as a critical-creative adaptation of Hay’s choreographic work.

Hay’s Buddhist philosophy of gestural language

ABSTRACTThe central role of gestural language in Buddhism is widely acknowledged, as in the story of the Buddha pointing at the moon, the point being the student’s seeing beyond the finger (as object) to its gesture (as act). Gesture’s role in dance is similarly central, as noted by scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dance studies. Unsurprisingly, then, the intersection of these two fields is well-populated, including the formal gestures (called “mudras”) Buddhism inherited from classical Indian dance, and the masked dance of the Mani Rimdu Festival. In this investigation, I will articulate a new Buddhist philosophy of gestural language, based on a new conception of emptiness that I locate in the work of contemporary U.S. choreographer Deborah Hay, as influenced by Nāgārjuna and Zen. And this, finally, suggests that contemporary Western philosophy should incorporate this compassion as a normative dimension to its own theorizing and practice.

Work(s) and (non)production in contemporary movement practices

This paper considers how the presentation of movement practices in performance contexts blurs the distinction between making and performance, raising questions about the nature of dance ‘works’. I examine the way that practice is foregrounded in the work of UK dance artists Katye Coe and Charlie Morrissey, and American choreographer Deborah Hay, troubling distinctions between the internal and external aspects of performance. In response to this, I examine the applicability of the work–concept (Goehr 1992), to current dance practices, suggesting that the concept is an open one and refers not solely to stable art objects, but also indicates open-ended entities, which are formed through a confluence of practice and performance.

Notes on Annotation

Notes on Annotation is one result of the work of the artist Florian Jenett on the Motion Bank Deborah Hay score project ‘Using the Sky’. The starting point for the project was her written score ‘No Time to Fly’ that the three dancer-choreographers invited to participate in the project—Jeanine Durning, Ros Warby and Juliette Map—based their own unique solo adaptations on. In order to account for the intrinsic movement variation in Deborah Hay's choreography, the decision was made to record as many versions as possible. To create a framework for analysing and comparing these twenty-one performances—seven from each performer—Jenett took on the task of annotating all video recordings. He used an altered version of the Piecemaker software developed by The Forsythe Company member David Kern for annotating their rehearsals. The following Notes on Annotation capture some of what he discovered during that intensive process. The results can be explored on http://scores.motionbank.org/dh

Scoring the Generating Principles of Performance Systems

How can we archive, pass on and further develop dance works that are not set, but rather generated systematically on stage? In performance-generating systems dancers respond to a specific set of tasks within restrictive rules and while recycling predetermined memories as source materials. To notate these systems we need to grasp and share the principles through which they generate movement interactions and not the composition that they produce. The question of how these systems work is intrinsically linked to the ways in which they facilitate or inhibit cognitive processes of memory and perception. The systems challenge performers to remain self-aware and pay attention differently while responding to their memories within restraints. Through this process, performers arrive at a differently earned presence that represents a shift in performance epistemology. This shift is, in turn, met by an equally important shift in dramaturgical orientation from what a performance is to how it works and generates. In Scoring the Generating Principles of Performance Systems Pil Hansen turns towards Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) from the cognitive sciences to develop an accessible and adaptable notation tool that implements these two shifts. Her proposal is advanced through a detailed discussion of how one can notate the choreographer Christopher House's 2015 adaptation of I'll Crane for You, a solo performance commissioning score by Deborah Hay. Hansen's discussion is informed, infused and complemented by House's responses and reflections upon his practice. Between their two voices, insights into the strategies that dancers devise in response to the cognitive challenges of performance-generating systems are discovered as key components of a DST-based notation tool.

Worlds of MoCap

This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of motion capture-based renderings of dance. By taking Nancy Stark Smith's hieroglyphs and Motion Bank's digital score Using the Sky (that explores Deborah Hay's score No Time to Fly) as main examples, a comparison is drawn between analogue and digital traces of dance that both rely on principles of capture instead of following a symbolic notation system. Although one is created by an ink pen and the other by a motion capture (MoCap) apparatus, these different types of drawing display some striking similarities. At the same time there are some fundamental differences in the ontological basis of these images, which affects the way in which we relate to these images and how they invite us to understand dance. Whereas the role of the dancing body as ‘drawing instrument’ remains present, this metaphor manifests itself in a different way in its digital surroundings. By analysing the meaning-making agents that are involved when a dancer is recorded in a motion capture setting and by relating the resulting imagery to relevant theoretical notions, such as ‘phenomenal dance image’ (Stewart), ‘flickering signifiers’ (Hayles), ‘gesturo-haptic media’ (Rotman) and ‘rightness of rendering’ (Goodman), the article traces preliminary answers to two central questions: What do these traces of dance depict? And who is doing the drawing? This article shows how motion capture practices in contemporary dance offer us opportunities to create new worlds through which we may start to know dance differently: artistically, by creating new phenomenal images of dance; analytically, by gaining insight in spatial and rhythmical patterns; and gesturo-haptically, by offering the radical opportunity to re-enact movement through mapping it on to other bodies.

Great Women Artists

In 1971 Linda Nochlin asked the art world, Why have there been no great women artists? Her subsequent answer suggested that it was institutional boundaries that hindered women from having the same access as their male counterparts. Forty years later the answer to this question has changed. As Catherine Morris suggests here, participation and influence of women in the art world is enormous. Morris is the third director and curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Part exhibition space, part education facility, the Center is focused on raising awareness of the cultural contributions of feminism to the arts. The exhibition space is anchored by Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974-79), which was created at the time that ''feminism'' came into common use as a term relating to a particular political and social sensibility in art. Moreover, the Center has traced the history of feminism as far back as the prehistoric age with exhibitions like the Fertile Goddess (2008-09) and has gone on to document trends in contemporary video art with Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video (2009 10). The looming question remains: What is feminist art? What arises are only more questions. The cycle of exhibitions that have come through the Center, and those that are forthcoming, only further challenge audience perceptions of what feminist art is and can be. Nonetheless, the task of defining both the history and current state of feminism does not seem to overwhelm Morris. She came to the Center in 2009 after serving as Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has used her short tenure to organize Kiki Smith: Soujourn (2010), which examines universal experiences of life from birth to death, and a small exhibition on the 1864 Brooklyn Sanitary Fair. What makes the Center so unique and, as Morris suggests, so important, is the opportunity to present the lineage of an art practice that has no geographic or chronological boundaries. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the following conversation, Morris discusses her background in feminist art, her perspective of its historic and changing role and the future of both the Center and feminist art practices. This conversation took place at Morris's office on April 12, 2010. HARRY J. WEIL: In 2006, for MIT's List Visual Arts Center, you organized 9 Reconsidered, an exhibition that examined Bell Laboratories' bringing together of a group of avant-garde artists with ten scientists. The result was a series of Happenings that took place in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. Several of the artists are now celebrated figures, like Robert Rauschenberg, Steve Paxton, and John Cage. Among them were also some of the earliest pioneers of performance art, including Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Deborah Hay. What was it like to have both men and women working with a technology that few predicted would ever be so instrumental to the creation and reception of art? CATHERINE MORRIS: There was a lot of openness in this group as they came together in the early 1960s in Lower Manhattan. Not only was there an acceptance of women artists, but an acceptance of dance and dance practices. This acceptance was essential to the group's development. The work of those women was on par with the men who participated. However, there was obviously a lot of sexism involved. Despite this, what made 9 Evenings so important and influential, in addition to the engineering aspect and use of new technology, was the community aspect and the way in which different artists came together to complete this project. This was about collaboration. These artists were working together closely before that and it made 9 Evenings quite successful. HW: This emphasis on feminist art in technology is vastly different from the permanent installation that anchors the Sackler Center--Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, This work is so much in line with the craft movement of the 1960s. …

Philosophy and the Bodily Arts

and I wouldn't know what the spirit of a philosopher might more want than to be a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety […]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Th...

Philosophical aesthetics and the study of dance as an academic discipline

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For a thoughtful and thought‐provoking paper on the concept of a degree, what counts as academic study, etc,. see Best (1980 Best, D. 1980. A policy for the study of physical education and human movement. The Journal of Human Movement Studies, 6: 336–347. [Google Scholar]). 2. See, for example, Binkley (1976 Binkley, T. 1976. “Deciding about art”. In Culture and art, Edited by: Aagaard‐Mogensen, L. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. [Google Scholar]). 3. This is not to discount the possibility of accompaniment being provided by an individual or individuals other than the choreographer alongside the composing of the movement. Nevertheless, decisions as to its suitability at every stage do require time on her/his part (and if s/he does not take ultimate responsibility, difficult problems must arise here when it comes to evaluation). 4. See, for example, Griffiths (1965 Griffiths, A. P. 1965. “A deduction of universities”. In Philosophical analysis and education, Edited by: Archambault, R. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [Google Scholar]). 5. See Schaper (1983 Schaper, E. 1983. “The pleasures of taste”. In Pleasure, preference and value, Edited by: Schaper, E. London: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]). 6. The valuable work of David Best in recent years, however, should not go unmentioned. 7. This sort of doubt, it might be said, typically assails the ‘man in the street’ confronted by anything new in the arts. My point here is that even for those accustomed to radical departures from what has previously been accepted as art (or dance, music, etc.) perhaps expecting to be surprised, shocked, disturbed, and so on, new dances sometimes seem retrogressive rather than progressive in terms of art; and that this is often confirmed by what choreographers say about their work. See Redfern (1983 Redfern, B. 1983. Dance, art and aesthetics, London: Dance Books Ltd. [Google Scholar]). 8. See, for example, the chapter on Deborah Hay in Banes (1980 Banes, S. 1980. Terpsichore in sneakers: post‐modern dance, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. [Google Scholar]). 9. In a Radio 4 ‘Kaleidoscope’ programme, July, 1981. 10. See, however, Sircello (1975 Sircello, G. 1975. A new theory of beauty, Princeton: University Press. [Google Scholar]). 11. See Stolnitz (1960 Stolnitz, J. 1960. Aesthetics and the philosophy of art criticism, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. [Google Scholar]). 12. See Scruton (1979 Scruton, R. 1979. The aesthetics of architecture, London: Methuen. [Google Scholar]) and Tanner (1977 Tanner, M. 1977. Sentimentality. The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LXXVII: 127–147. [Google Scholar]).

Scène and Contemporaneity

This second installment of TDR's continuing series on choreography and philosophy addresses dance and temporality. Paula Caspão describes the economy of movement and language as a stuttering, relational, affective field. Frédéric Pouillaude argues that contemporaneity links dance and scène, which in French means both an abstract place for an event and, more concretely, the stage. In a dialogue, Danielle Goldman and Deborah Hay follow up on Goldman's considerations of how improvisation offers “escape routes”—for and from dance, theory, and time.

Stroboscopic Stutter: on the not-yet-captured ontological condition of limit-attractions

This second installment of TDR's continuing series on choreography and philosophy addresses dance and temporality. Paula Caspão describes the economy of movement and language as a stuttering, relational, affective field. Frédéric Pouillaude argues that contemporaneity links dance and scène, which in French means both an abstract place for an event and, more concretely, the stage. In a dialogue, Danielle Goldman and Deborah Hay follow up on Goldman's considerations of how improvisation offers “escape routes”—for and from dance, theory, and time.

Deborah Hay's O, O

This second installment of TDR's continuing series on choreography and philosophy addresses dance and temporality. Paula Caspão describes the economy of movement and language as a stuttering, relational, affective field. Frédéric Pouillaude argues that contemporaneity links dance and scène, which in French means both an abstract place for an event and, more concretely, the stage. In a dialogue, Danielle Goldman and Deborah Hay follow up on Goldman's considerations of how improvisation offers “escape routes”—for and from dance, theory, and time.

Choreography as Apparatus of Capture

This second installment of TDR's continuing series on choreography and philosophy addresses dance and temporality. Paula Caspão describes the economy of movement and language as a stuttering, relational, affective field. Frédéric Pouillaude argues that contemporaneity links dance and scène, which in French means both an abstract place for an event and, more concretely, the stage. In a dialogue, Danielle Goldman and Deborah Hay follow up on Goldman's considerations of how improvisation offers “escape routes”—for and from dance, theory, and time.

The Story of O,O

© 2006 Joanna Brotman No matter how abstract or nonliteral an artistic work may seem, our fundamental human drive to express and to discover meaning and story in what we experience is always engaged. Non-literal work doesn’t force the issue, instead it gives us breathing room to come to terms with images in our own way, and to create our own sense of what we see and hear and feel. Merce Cunningham, who is widely regarded as one of the most abstract of choreographers, said that emotion is always present in dance “because it’s a human being doing it. A human being is not an abstract. I think that everything a human does is expressive in some way.” In Deborah Hay’s O,O, choreographer, dancer, and audience conspire to reflect the world in a bubble, to find the meaning intrinsic in movement, and to make a story of the seemingly random confluence of events.

Deborah Hay: A performance primer

I dare you to see my attention. Deborah Hay1 1 All quotations in this text are by Deborah Hay, except for the one by Deborah Jowitt. Uncited quotations refer to statements Hay made during the cours...

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

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-

What Has Become of Postmodern Dance? Answers and Other Questions by Marcia B. Siegel, Anna Halprin, Janice Ross, Cynthia J. Novack, Deborah Hay, Sally Banes, Senta Driver, Roger Copeland, and Susan L. Foster

Ed. Note: In the I960S, the emergence of dance triggered a whirlwind of questions, is it prominent among them. The new dance prevailed, however, and set the agenda for the '70s and early '8os. But at that point, tanztheater, Reagan, and megamarketing intervened, and dance in America underwent significant changes. The aesthetic was diffused and, in some cases, willfully transgressed. Some of the most satisfying dance today has more in common with Doris Humphrey than Yvonne Rainer. The well-choreographed dance and premeditated meaning has made a comeback. And at the other end of the spectrum, personal narrative and ritual are providing alternative bases for dance making. What has become of dance? We asked a variety of choreographers, critics, and historians to tackle the question. Their answers suggest that the discussion is still very much an open one, filled with caveats and parenthetical qualifications. Even the terminology is still being debated. The meaning of postmodern (and modern, concomitantly) varies profoundly between and even within disciplines, denoting cultural, stylistic, or historical distinctions. In dance studies, the term postmodern originated as an historical category. Decades later, much of the vigorousness of the discourse results from the effort to reconcile that use of the word with the very different paradigms informing the concept in art, architecture, and cultural theory. One of the reasons that this effort remains so problematic is the traditional model of dance history, rather than dance studies. Up until recently, the

Playing Awake: Letters to My Daughter

Ed. Note: Performing artist Deborah Hay wrote the following letters to her daughter, Savannah, earlier this year.1 They describe both the process of performing for 22 evenings straight in January-February 1989 and the evolution of her newest work, The Aviator. The piece completes a trilogy, which Hay began in 1986 in collaboration with new-music composer Ellen Fullman, titled The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom. Parts I and II, The Navigator and The Gardener, premiered in New York City in 1987 and Amsterdam in 1988, respectively. At presstime, the completed trilogy was scheduled to premiere in Austin at the University of Texas Opera Lab Theatre in September 1989.