Horse Rider Woman Playing Dancing: Ann Daly Interviews Deborah Hay

Ann Daly Interviews Deborah Hay

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Introduction

The landscape of American experimental dance is parched and desolate. Even the youngest generation, once presumed our best bet for innovation, now emerges from college dance departments where once revolutionary ideas have calcified into tepid technique and bad choreography. How ironic that some of today’s most radical dance is being made by a 56-year-old, Deborah Hay.

Figure 1.

Deborah Hay in Voilà. Photo: Courtesy Emma Dodge Hanson.

Figure 2.

Grace Mi-He Lee in Voilà. Photo: Courtesy Phyllis Liedeker.

Figure 3.

Scott Heron in Voilà. Photo: Courtesy Phyllis Liedeker

But maybe not so ironic. The last two decades have demonstrated that youth is not by definition radical, or even resistant. My dance history students struggle less to identify with Louis XIV’s court than they do with the Judson Dance Theatre. “I’m so glad,” one student grumbled during a class about the 60s, “that I didn’t live then.” Experimentation as an ideal has been supplanted by marketability; the avant-garde had a long run, but it is over.

The Judson community, which included Hay, was unprecedented, and is irreplicable. Except for Douglas Dunn, Hay remains the only choreographer fully living out its experimental ethos. (Yvonne Rainer moved out of dance, into film, in the 1970s.) More so than Merce Cunningham, Hay has followed the lead of John Cage, and herself became an artist-philosopher. Since 1970, she has committed to the daily practice of “playing awake”—a perpetual perceptual exercise, a constant state of inquiry.

It was after her 1964 world tour with Cunningham that Hay renounced her formal training, and set out to “un-learn” a lifetime of dance, which she began as a pupil of her mother, who had danced in the ballet corps at the Roxy Theatre. The adult Hay began making dances, for untrained performers, consisting of stripped-down movement set within highly organized structures. In the 1970s she created a series of Circle Dances, recorded in her book Moving through the Universe in Bare Feet (Swallow Press, 1975), that adapted the energy flow of tai chi for a folk dance format. In 1976 she moved to Austin, Texas, and performed her first solo dance concert. In 1980 she created a small dance company (disbanded five years later) and taught the first of 15 annual large group workshops, each of which provided the ground for her solo repertoire, including The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom (1989) and Lamb at the Altar (1992), which she documented in Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (Duke University Press, 1994).

The solo Voilà was inspired by Hay’s last large group workshop, held in 1995. Shortly after its premiere, she wrote a 16-page libretto, an intricate layering of description, memoir, commentary, and stage direction that slides between first- and third-person perspectives. Then she performed the libretto as a monologue, entitled a performance of a performance (1996). For its final incarnation, Hay invited two former students, Scott Heron and Grace Mi-He Lee, to reconstruct Voilà from the libretto and perform their versions with her at The Kitchen in New York City in April 1997. The complex geneology of Voilà is testament to Hay’s fundamental inquisitiveness, resourcefulness, devotion to process, and her fondness for play. For Hay, dance is a way of knowing, one that our culture obstinately ignores. It’s her job to tease out what the body knows, and dancing is the “trick” she deploys to do so.

Hay refuses the dancer’s posture of mastery. Instead, she relishes playing the fool. In Voilà, she surprises us with her mouth farts, so shockingly childish a pastime to see so earnestly performed on stage. As are the strange faces and stranger costume, in which she is emperor, horse, and jester. As in most play, Hay’s is serious. With Voilà, in its myriad manifestations, she posed an ambitious range of aesthetic and spiritual questions: What is...