My Body, The Buddhist

foreword

foreword Susan Leigh Foster Introducing Deborah Hay’s body-as-Buddhist. Such an agile body, capable of lightning-quick transformations—floppy then precise, always deft, full of buffoonery and deadly serious in its commitment to each gesture. It gallops, swaggers, tip-toes, and falls gently backward into the embrace of space. Scrambling or gliding to standing, it grimaces . The softest leaps, the most preposterous gestures, it happily cavorts before slowing to stillness, a dynamic tranquillity. The flexibility , the unpredictability of its attitudes draw us toward it. It gazes back at those who view it with a generous invitation to be looked at. This body, it is proposed, practices a religion renowned for its skeptical stance toward religion. It performs as teacher, oracle, and companion in the investigation, not of spirituality, but of consciousness itself . Alternately a corporeal provocateur that poses the question of consciousness and the medium through which the investigation of consciousness takes shape, the Buddhist body moves matter-offactly through its day. Hay has cultivated this body, discovered and rediscovered it over many years of dancing. In training to make and perform dances, she attends to the body’s changeability. She explores the ramifications of multiple, distinctive metaphorical framings of physicality. Body, in turn, has offered a kind of dialogue—probing, assessing, reacting, and instigating—in response to Hay’s various queries. Close and consistent attentiveness to this dialogue forms the basis of Hay’s regimen for learning to dance and also generates the motional matter from which her dances are made. For Hay, choreography emerges from her ongoing reflections about bodiliness. My Body, The Buddhist documents this generative play between corporeality and consciousness and between the dance of everyday life and dance as a theatrical practice. The text’s non-narrative account of a choreographer’s daily work mingles descriptions of living, training, Deborah Hay: My Body, The Buddhist page ix ix Deborah Hay: My Body, The Buddhist page x x : foreword creating, and performing so as to illuminate the integral relation between artistic vision and the daily pursuit of that vision. Fleshing out the body’s “daringly ordinary perspicacity,” she sustains the quizzical , illusive maverickness of body even as she illumines corporeal existence through her descriptions of it.   As a dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a participant in the Judson Dance Theater performances, an independent choreographer located in Austin, Texas, and as world-touring performer and teacher, Hay has elaborated a powerful alternative dancing practice. She is continuously upheaving our assumptions about dance and the body. She shows us how interesting stillness is, and how quickly physical commitment can change from one action, persona , or image to another. Her dances elaborate a theatricality that appears pedestrian, intimate, and casual one minute while filled with wonderment, alterity, and sumptuousness the next. Above all, her work invites us to laugh at our own seriousness and take in the dancing seriously, both at the same time. Hay’s sustained dedication to alternative choreographic values such as these is an extraordinary achievement, especially during this era of lack of support, monetary and otherwise, for the arts. During the 1960s, when Hay came of age as an artist, art-making was one of several alternative cultural practices through which mainstream values were critically interrogated. Works by Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Eleo Pomare, and the Judson choreographers all pushed at the boundaries of acceptable dance movement and introduced alternative vocabularies and stagings for danced performance. One of the results of their efforts has been to make evident the specificity of the relationship between technical competence and choreographic vision. Unlike ballet, where standard criteria of evaluation and a universalist ideal of expertise are developed, Hay and others of her generation have proposed projects that require radically alternative sets of physical skills. Unlike modern dance pioneers such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, whose vocabularies seemed to issue from pan-human psychic dynamics, choreographers from the 1960s shifted the focus away from psychological origins and toward the Deborah Hay: My Body, The Buddhist page xi foreword : xi physical matter of dance-making. Their work demonstrates how each new choreographic project requires special skills and hence special training in order for the dancer to acquire those skills. Hay’s work exemplifies a radical and fully realized vision of this kind of alternative training program and choreography. Many contemporary choreographers blur or obscure the ways that training inculcates aesthetic...