The Deborah Hay Dance Company's mission is to foster a discerning appreciation for the human body within the cultural construct of contemporary society, through dance as experienced by audience, student, and/or performer. Central to this mission is the role of humor in recognizing the wildly cogent dancer we are capable of exercising into action.

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The goals of the DHDC are: to challenge judgments which limit how we identify the physical body in time and space, broadening the traditions of flow, beauty, and form that are currently prevalent in dance, and to expand the cultural concept of “dance” by defining the dancer as a site for inquiry, i.e. a bodily presence trained in the performance of parallel experiences of perception. An outline for advancing this project follows:

1) continue to introduce and explore through teaching and performing, how the cellular body, when invested with imaginative capability, can produce feelings of altering immediacy and gripping relatedness in the sensate body;

2) raise our standard of participating in a world beyond the subjective, where dance can become not just the site where movement and shape are produced, but a threshold where energies shift, multiply, and become visible;

3) expand the notion of choreography to include the conditions by which the choreographer transmits a dance to a performer, accounting for the many and often discontinuous threads within a visible and invisible context for beholding now.

4) In response to the rapid proliferation of digital technology and the dormancy of lived time, the DHDC is consolidating its effort to reclaim the human body as a value to be nurtured.


A “shard of a niche.”

In April, 1999, Deborah attended a meeting steered by Nello McDaniel and George Thorn of Arts Action Research, who work with professional arts organizations on (a) planning, (b) clarity and articulation of vision/mission and direction, (c) organizational structure, (d) human resource development, and (e) transitional issues. Their presence in Austin was at the invitation of Lisa Fehrman, a dancer, choreographer, and the director of Stillpoint Dance Company.

The concept that made Deborah's mouth drop open was what Nello described as a new entrepreneurial term, shard-of-niche. It used to be that a business described its niche. The Arts Action Research team requested that each arts organization at this meeting answer a few questions in order to help determine its shard-of-a-niche. The DHDC decided to publish its responses as a way to update its commitment to our work and community.

Describe the historical context in which the DHDC exists:

In 1960, at the age of 19, Deborah Hay moved from Brooklyn into Manhattan. Her choreographic work developed in the midst of the most radical cultural revolution in the United States. Hay soon became one of the central figures in the Judson Dance Theatre, a community of artists whose work challenged the prevailing canon of modern choreography, from who dances to the very notion of what constitutes a dance. Out of these explorations, fabulous collaborations occurred between visual artists and dance artists. Their works were primarily showcased at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, in art galleries, and museums. It is in this context that Hay collaborated with artist Robert Rauschenberg, which then led to her participation in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company during a six-month world tour in 1964. As the most radical trends in the NYC art scene moved in new directions, Hay, unlike many of her peers, left Manhattan to settle in Vermont, where she lived in a community for six and a half years. It was during those prolonged periods of quiet rural life, that the foundation of her current work was laid.

Following the noisy vanguard years in NYC, Hay's experience of Vermont's day to day stillness synthesized her ideas into a minimal concept of dance, ethically and aesthetically grounded on the principle that less is more. To this day she makes dances without a linear construct to achieve. She creates conditions for a direct experience of all kinds of phenomena. She locates in those phenomena the interpretive keys to the performance and understanding of each dance. Her faith in this process, now in its 30th year, is the innermost raison d'etre for her ongoing experiments.

When she moved to Austin, Texas, in 1976, it was as a single parent with a five-year-old daughter and the intention of supporting them teaching and performing dance. This happened without compromising her work. She has produced a remarkable output of solo performances, and has become a prominent member of the artistic community, where she is praised not only for her performances but also as an extraordinary teacher and advocate. She performs and teaches all over the world, writes extensively, and has published several articles and three books, Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet, Swallow Press, 1975, Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance, Duke University Press, 1994, which are highly regarded in their genre, and My Body, The Buddhist, Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

Describe the DHDC's central philosophy, aesthetics or programming filters. What is the value system that Deborah Hay embodies?

As Northrop Frye remarks in his introduction to Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire, (transl. Alan C.M. Ross. Boston, 1964), "to the imagination, fire is not a separable datum of experience: it is already linked by analogy and identity with a dozen other aspects of experience."
The same is true, if not more so, of dance. Dancer and dance are alive with images ranging from slut to angel, animal, vegetable, mineral, water, light, love, god, spirit, dust, beauty, universe, etc. It is nearly impossible to read the body without these psychological encumbrances, in other words, not simply historical and cultural references but material imbedded in our psyches.
Hay's choreography is structured so that the dance performer must divest attachment to even the magic of each moment in order to fulfill the choreographic requirements of her dances. The dancer is then without the weight of her/his convictions about dance. What remains, for the dancer, and in turn the audience, is an opportunity to see what has not been seen before. Thus dance is alive with the recognition of one's perceptual activity rather than assurances found in memory, desire, physical training, or prowess, which, by analogy, could as well be found in sports.

What are the programs/activities that support this center and who are they designed to serve?

Most of the classes and workshops conducted by Deborah are attended by untrained and trained dancers/performers. This format continues to challenge the old paradigm about who is the dancer and what is a dance. Hay does not teach a movement technique. Her language is simple, though deceptively so. It is directed to the imaginative rather than the physical body. She seeks to instill a sense of transparency and brilliance through attention to each moment, thus bypassing assumptions about beauty and form. Her teaching is allied with how one sees others dancing, so that while the dancer is being served, so is the future audience for experimental dance.

Because writing has become a central element in Deborah Hay's understanding and the transmission of her dances, it is also part of her movement/ choreography training. Writing down the dance, giving it linear form when and where it is possible, lifts dance out of the silent world it inhabits. She believes that to write about the experience of dancing is to help address the body's intelligence, power, and magic for the dancer and dance audiences.

Watching Hay’s work, audiences realize that their usual references for making sense of what they see, fall apart. At this moment audiences can make a quantum shift in how they see. New doorways of perception can open onto an inner world within the viewer.
The DHDC’s performances are primarily showcased in 80-125 seat theaters. Her audiences are those associated with the theater in which she is presented, plus dance critics, scholars, her students, and/or a small but constant group of people who find reward in following her artistic development.

What is the criteria for success? What are the qualitative aspects that lets us know the DHDC is working?

At the most fundamental level, the company's ability to support Deborah's continuing investigations and contributions to the field of new dance is its criteria for success. Our qualitative indicators are the energy, sustenance, change, and depth Hay brings to community through her contribution to the discipline of dance and the arts in general. The Deborah Hay Dance Company's Board of Directors is dedicated and proud to support the creative life of this major figure in American dance.