There are aspects of dance performance that I had always accepted as a given. Working with Deborah Hay has deepened my understanding of what we do as dancers. She has helped bring a greater vitality to the stage.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Living in Manhattan by 1960 and studying at the Cunningham studio, she became part a group of experimental artists who were primarily influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, later known as the Judson Dance Theater, one of the most radical and explosive art movements of the twentieth century. In 1964 she danced with the Cunningham Dance Company during a 6-month tour through Europe and Asia. By 1967, Hay had already achieved a certain status as a young choreographer and her distinctive style began to emerge. She focused on large-scale dance projects involving untrained dancers, thus distancing herself from the performing arena and opening a long period of reflection about how dance is transmitted and who dances.

This stage of Hay’s career reached into the following decade. In 1970 she left New York and settled in a community in northern Vermont. In this period Hay began to define a rigorous method of performance practice that still continues to inform her work as a student, teacher, and dancer. The most notable achievement of the period is a series of 10 circle dances, which did not include an audience. This encounter, of a powerful concept combined with the exquisitely simple choreography of the ten dances, are collected and described in Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet (Swallow Press, 1975). Hay’s first book on choreography and the first example of her distinctive memory/concept mode of choreographic record, is based on the narratives underlining the process of her dance-making, rather than the technical specifications or notations of their form.

In 1976 Hay left Vermont and moved to Austin, Texas. Her attention focused now on ‘playing awake’, practices that engage the whole person who is performing. While developing her concepts, she instituted a yearly four-month group workshop, in which these exercises were developed and shaped into evening-length dances that culminated in public performances. Her second book, Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (Duke University Press, 1994) documents the unique creative process that defined these works, Hay’s most exquisite group dances, produced between1980 to 1996. Her third book, My Body, the Buddhist, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2000.

Since the mid-nineties Deborah Hay has focused almost exclusively on the choreography of solo dances, performing them around the world and passing them on to notable performers in the US, Europe, and Australia.

In June 2000 Hay was commissioned to choreograph a duet for herself and Mikhail Baryshnikov and a piece for the White Oak Dance Project. She toured with the company in Fall 2000.

Deborah Hay tours in the US, Europe, and Australia both as a performer and a teacher. She has collaborated with musicians Ellen Fullman, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Terry Riley, Richard Landry, and Australian actor/playwright/director Margaret Cameron. She received a 1983 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography, numerous National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship in 1996. In 2001 and 2004 she was awarded a National Touring Grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. In 2002 she was inducted into the first Hall of Fame for the Arts, in Austin, Texas. In 2004 she received a BessieAward for the choreography of The Match. www.deborahhay.com