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to imagine that that is just an idea you have about yourself.' She's like the genius rug puller!" Upon further thought, he says, "It's incredibly generous, really, for someone to say, at that point in my career, everything that's been up until now is just one version of you." Hay no longer calls what she does "improvisation." She prefers the word "choreography" but she clearly has no interest in making up steps. Instead, she poses questions like "What if?" or gives directives and encourages the dancers to respond in as authentic a way as possible. For Figure a Sea, some of the questions included the following: "How do you not get seduced by the center of the space? How do you enliven the edges of the space?" Influenced by the recent wave of museum performances, she also asked, "What happens when museums and galleries come onto the stage?" To address this last question, Cullberg's lighting designer, the much acclaimed Minna Tiikkainen, gave her a white floor to simulate a gallery. The device of matching was part of Hay's larger question about seeing, which was, as Mohn puts it, "How am I perceiving this, and how does that affect my movement?" Hay's desire to stretch how we see also applies to the audience. Her advice to viewers of Figure a Sea: "Instead of reducing how you see, instead of editing your experience of perception, just keep opening, as you would when looking at a sea. And you can't hold onto a sea, you can't grasp a sea. Part of it is just being OK with not grasping." She continues: "The body itself is a sea. We think of it as a finite entity ... but we're a sea of change, a sea is a possibility. Figure a Sea is like a sea within a sea to me. Nineteen bodies, nineteen seas." Wendy Perron, author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer, is on the faculty of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. The former editor in chief of Dance Magazine, she now writes commentary at wendyperron.com. Eva Mohn, an American dancer with Cullberg, says that, considering the attraction of the white space, it's quite a challenge to stay with the proposed questions. In a phone interview, she told me that Hay brought in the idea of a chess game to suggest a certain kind of strategy. "The joy of it," said Mohn, "is to try to figure out what the game is inside Deborah's regime." There is no strict unison in Figure a Sea, but you will see some clustering when the dancers fall in with each other. This reflects one of Hay's choreographic tools since her Bessie Award–winning piece The Match (2004). "You're already in the movement of someone who's caught your eye, and that's great to let it happen. I call that matching, as opposed to copying. It's an essential thing on earth. You're not even making a choice; it's happening, and then when you do recognize it, enjoy it." From Using the Sky: A Dance the latest book by Deborah Hay Swimming on my back is how I exercise outdoors; thus the sky has become a body of material to notice, especially when there are no clouds, as is often the case where I live. Fairly recently, while I was backstroking, a field of nuanced atmospheric activity came into focus through my application of the question, 'What if I presume I am served by how I see?' Was I seeing things because of the question, or was it an actual visible condition I never noticed before? After a few days I associated what I was seeing as a continuation of the sky, and I have been relying on that now pervasive reality to promote a sense of interconnectedness with all there is when I dance. (Routledge, 2015) " " www.peakperfs.org 17

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