Danspace Project and the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation co-produced Deborah Hay’s new work “O, O,” which premiered on January 26-29, 2006 at St. Mark’s Church in- the-Bowery, New York City. “O, O” was based on Hay’s new solo,  Room. The project brought together five independent choreographer/performers: Jeanine Durning, Neil Greenberg, Miguel Gutierrez, Juliette Mapp, and Vicky Shick. Each of these dancers has been playing a pioneering role in the alternative dance world in New York City for over ten years. Artist Jennifer Tipton provided lighting.

“O, O” is performed in the round, and it is a further development of the choreographic experiments of the 2004 Bessie Award winning dance, The Match. Hay’s choreography of “O, O” engages the cast of performers in several koan-like questions that challenge their perceptual and physical limitations. The performance itself is an extension of this answerless questioning process. The spectator too is drawn into the same kind of unsolvable cycles of riddles and reflections. Similarly to The Match, the formal design of “O, O” resolutely questions recognizable dance vocabularies, and develops an aesthetic realm of its own by leading the performers to constantly redefine the nature of learned and unlearned movement patterns.

In February 2006, the Centre National de Dance Contemporaine/Angers, Les Subsistances / Lyon, Les Spectacles Vivants / Centre Pompidou Paris, Centre National de Danse Pantin, and FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance), will co-produce a similar project with seven French choreographer/performers: Nuno Bizarro, Corinne Garcia, Emmanuelle Huynh, Jennifer Lacey, Catherine Legrand, Laurent Pichaud, and Sylvain Prunenec. The difference between the NY and the French Projects, other than its cast, is that the dancers will first learn Hay’s solo Room, and practice their own adaptations for three months before beginning to work on the choreography of “O, O.” Their intimate knowledge of the material will then be transposed into the re-creation of “O, O” for its Lyon premiere of June 9-10, 2006. “O, O” will also be presented at the Festival d'Automne in Paris in 2006.

The Deborah Hay Dance Company looks forward to presenting in the near future the New York and the Lyon versions of “O, O” as two halves of a single program.