Mikhail Baryshnikov has called Hay
"the queen of ... internal commitment
in improvisation." In order to transfer
this internal focus to younger artists,
Hay started the Solo Performance
Commissioning Project in 1998. It
was held annually in Whidbey Island,
Washington, and later near Inverness,
Scotland. Some of today's most
intriguing dancer/choreographers,
including Miguel Gutierrez, Jeanine
Durning, Juliette Mapp, Scott Heron,
Wally Cardona, and Ros Warby, have
deepened their own choreography
through their intensive investigations
with Hay.
Hay wants dancers to experience
innocence and vulnerability. To that
end, she throws them right into her
structural score rather than rehearsing
part by part. Gutierrez, who worked
with Hay on O, O, was initially taken
aback by her approach. On Hay's
website he tells this story: "When I
told her that I usually warm up to get
into a kind of state for this kind of
improvisational work, she said, 'OK,
for the next three weeks I want you
"
As she stripped away movements and structures
to find the essential qualities of dance, Hay's view
of the art intersected with a vision of a life integrating
with a continuous, refined consciousness
of changes, motion, and rhythm with all other aspects
of daily living. In such a scheme, the outside observer
is superfluous. Life is dance and to experience it fully
one must not stand outside it.
—Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (Wesleyan University Press, 1987)
"
Laurie Anderson & Deborah Hay
Photo: Erica Espling
www.peakperfs.org 15
