Interview

New York City, 25 September 2006

DANIELLE GOLDMAN:

I was watching the DVD of O, O [2006] this morning. The ending is incredibly poignant.

DEBORAH HAY:

What do you mean by "the end"?

GOLDMAN:

Well, that's hard to say. But I was thinking of the point where the dancers are in a cluster and Miguel [Gutierrez] begins to wail. From there, up until the group slowly steps away from Jeanine [Durning]. This is exquisite, and I'm wondering if you could describe the score and explain how you arrived at this section of the dance.

HAY:

It's interesting that you should start with that. Do you know Laurent Pichaud? He performed here last year and he's in the French O, O. He's now practicing the solo adaptation of O, O [Room], and he writes me frequently about what he's going through. We were talking about the dramaturgy for Room, whatever that word [dramaturgy] means. Someone told me the dramaturge is the person who keeps the writer, or the director, on course and in the moment. When

Deborah Hay, Shtudio Show, New York City, 21 January 2006. (Photo by Alex Escalante)

I first taught Room to the French cast—that was in February [2006], after I'd done O, O here—I went to Angiers and started to teach the solo. [Unlike the New York cast, which started working as a group right away, members of the French cast began by learning the solo version from Hay on one of her initial visits to France. They were supposed to practice on their own while Hay was in the States.] Originally, the solo went from complete conformity to complete anarchy. That's the way I worked on it, and it was the way I taught it. Then, when I came to New York and started working on O, O, I just didn't feel like anarchy worked with what the dancers were doing. I couldn't articulate what it was I wanted from them. Also, part of that end of the piece is a lament—a spontaneous lament. Somehow I wanted a spontaneous lament.

GOLDMAN:

"Lament" seems like the perfect word.

HAY:

In working with the spontaneous lament, the sounds that were coming out of Miguel and Juliette [Mapp], who had never even sung before, were just extraordinary. So I had to work with that.

I also was thinking a lot about execution—people being executed without trial—and that's where the black veil came from. Rather than an explosive ending—anarchy—I needed something quiet. I also realized that this was the end of the dance. Somehow the poetics of this were very exciting to me. It wasn't intentional.

GOLDMAN:

In this political climate, it's hard not to be affected by an image of people walking away from a silent, veiled woman. I performed in an antiwar dance that Juliette choreographed last year [April 2005] called One. It was performed in St. Mark's Church, the same space as O, O, and it seems like the sound of Juliette's lament expresses a part of what drove her to make One.

Can you talk about the relationship between Room and O, O?

HAY:

Well, I worked on Room by myself for about a year. Then, I taught it as part of the solo commissioning project the summer prior to O, O. [For a fuller description of the Solo Performance Commissioning Project, see deborahhay.com/spcp.html. Dancers commission a solo dance from Hay, who coaches them over several days in a residency setting. The dancers then promise to practice the solo daily for three months before their first public performance.] And then I came back from that project and continued practicing O, O, knowing that I was going to turn it into a quintet in New York. So, there are a lot of similarities. That's how I work: a solo becomes a group piece, and then the group piece becomes a solo, and it just keeps going on that way. The French O, O is probably a combination...