Hay continued to conduct research for her work If I Sing to You, a piece commissioned by William Forsythe. With her cast of six distinguished international performers, Hay rehearsed for two weeks while pointedly experimenting with costuming and audience participation through several public interactions. Upon leaving MANCC, the cast premiered the work in Dresden, Germany. The collaborators are Michelle Boulé (U.S.), Jeanine Durning (U.S.), Catherine LeGrand (France), Juliette Mapp (U.S.), Vera Nevanlinna (Finland), and Amelia Reeber (U.S.)
Deborah Hay was born in Brooklyn. Her mother was her first dance teacher, and directed her training until she was a teenager. She moved to Manhattan in the 1960’s, where she continued her training with Merce Cunningham and Mia Slavenska. In 1964, Hay danced with the Cunningham Dance Company during a 6-month tour through Europe and Asia. Hay was a member of a group of experimental artists that was deeply influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The group, later known as the Judson Dance Theater, became one of the most radical and explosive 20th century art movements.
By 1967, Hay had already achieved a prominent status as a young choreographer, and her unique style began to emerge as a distinct voice within the aesthetics of Judson. Sharing with her colleagues the ideas that dance engage with other art forms, and that the artificial distinction between trained and untrained performers be challenged, she focused on large-scale dance projects involving untrained dancers, fragmented and choreographed music accompaniment, and the execution of ordinary movement patterns performed under stressful conditions.
In 1970 she left New York to live in a community in northern Vermont. Soon, she distanced herself from the performing arena, producing 10 “Circle Dances,” performed on 10 consecutive nights within a single community and no audience whatsoever. Thus began a long period of reflection about how dance is transmitted and presented. Her first book, Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet (Swallow Press, 1975), is an early example of her distinctive memory/concept mode of choreographic record, and emphasizes 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 on a set of practices ("playing awake") that engaged the performer on several levels of consciousness at once. While developing her concepts over the course of 15 years, she instituted a yearly four-month group workshop that culminated in large group public performances and from these group pieces she distilled her solo dances. 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.
In the late 1990’s Deborah Hay focused almost exclusively on rarified and enigmatic solo dances based on her new experimental choreographic method, such as The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom, Voilà, The Other Side of O, Fire, Boom Boom Boom, Music, Beauty, The North Door, The Ridge, Room, performing them around the world and passing them on to noted performers in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. She also choreographed a duet for herself and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Single Duet, which toured with the Past/Forward project in 2000.
Her third book, My Body, the Buddhist (Wesleyan University Press, 2000) is an introspective series of reflections on the major lessons of life that she has learned from her body while dancing. Hay’s work has now reached a new stage, where she redefines the inimitable choreographic method of her solo pieces in collaboration with highly trained dancers. In 2004 she received a NYC Bessie award for her choreography of the quartet The Match, which toured in Austin, Houston, London, Nottingham, Montpellier, and Paris in 2005. She has collaborated with many artists from different areas, such as composers Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Richard Landry, Terry Riley, Ellen Fullman, artist Tina Girouard, and Australian actor/playwright/director Margaret Cameron, among others. She has been the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including a 1983 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography, numerous National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship in 1996.
The Deborah Hay Dance Company
The goals of the DHDC are: a) to challenge assumptions which limit how we identify the physical body in time and space, through a revision of prevailing historical traditions and a critique of our current understanding of form, flow, and beauty, in dance; b) to expand the cultural concept of ‘dancer’ by redefining his/her role as a site for inquiry; and, c) to expand notions of choreography to include the process through which a choreographer transmits a dance to a performer, accounting for the many and often discontinuous threads, visible and invisible, that effect the presence and immediacy of the dancer.
Michelle Boulé (U.S.) is a dance artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She currently works with the John Jasperse Company and Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. Previously, she has worked with Donna Uchizono, Beth Gill, Doug Varone (Metropolitan Opera), Gabriel Masson and Judith Sanchez-Ruiz. She has taught dance at the University of Illinois, George Washington University, Hollins University, the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts, and, in New York, at Movement Research, the Trisha Brown Studios, Dance New Amsterdam, and the American Dance Festival NY Intensive. In 2002, she was a DanceWEB scholarship recipient at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna. Her work has been shown at Danspace Project’s Food for Thought, P.S. 122’s Hothouse, the Krannert Center in IL, and the University of Utah. She is thrilled to be working with Deborah Hay in the spring of 2008.
Jeanine Durning (U.S.), based in NYC, is a performer, teacher and maker of dance, valuing the integrity of each and the integration of all. Her process within each is built on a foundation of curiosity, questioning and learning. She directs a project based ensemble under her name and those performance projects, over the past decade of creating work, have been presented throughout New York City, across the US and in England, UK, under the auspices of commissions. In support of her choreography most recently, Ms. Durning was awarded the 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography, is the recipient of the 2007 Alpert Award in Choreography and was the 2007 Viola Farber resident through Sarah Lawrence College, affording her time and space to develop a new work, Ex-Memory: waywewere, which will premiere in NYC in 2008/09.
Jeanine has learned and continues to learn about this form from many people, working in many different mediums. Among the choreographers she has had the pleasure of working and collaborating with most recently are Deborah Hay, Susan Rethorst, Richard Siegal and Chris Yon. She was a member of David Dorfman Dance from 1993-2002, collaborating on creating over 10 original roles for the company. Durning is a teacher of contemporary techniques and composition (in both, often concentrating on the hybridization of the practical and the philosophical) and has been invited to teach at many universities and festivals and to make original work for repertory companies, independent performers and students.
Catherine LeGrand (France) is dancing in different projects these last three years with Emmanuelle Huynh, Alain Michard, Déborah Hay, Loîc Touzé, Laurent Pichaud, Dominique Jégou. Between 1994 et 2003 she is part of the works as an interpreter of Olivia Grandville, Xavier Marchand, Hervé Robbe, Alain Michard, Boris Charmatz. In 1997 and 2000 she gives birth to her two children. In 1982 she meets Dominique Bagouet, stays with the company until the end in 1993. Since that she shares regulary many projects of teaching the repertory of this choreograph with the Carnets Bagouet in different companies and schools.
Juliette Mapp (U.S.) is a dancer, teacher and choreographer based in NYC. Juliette has worked with many choreographers including John Jasperse (whom she received a New York Dance and Performance Award "Bessie" for outstanding performance), Vicky Shick, Deborah Hay, Jennifer Monson, Irene Hultman, Neil Greenberg and Stephanie Skura. Juliette has taught throughout Europe, Asia, South America and the United States. She is also on the faculty of Movement Research and teaches at Universities and Colleges regularly. Most recently she completed a year as visiting professor at George Washington University in Washington D.C. Prior to that she was on the faculty at Hunter College in NYC. Juliette's teaching is influenced by her study of Kinetic Awareness, Skinner Releasing, Body-Mind Centering and The Alexander Technique. Juliette has been making her own dances for the past six years which have been presented around NYC including Danspace Project and Dance Theater Workshop.
Vera Nevanlinna (Finland) graduated as a dancer with M.A. in Dance Studies from the Theater Academy of Finland in 1998. Since then she has been working as a freelance dancer and a choreographer and has taken extra studies in dance in New York with Rosane Chamecki & Andrea Lerner, Miguel Gutierrez, Barbara Mahler and Sara Pearson & Patrik Widrig among others. Before dance studies Nevanlinna graduated as a freelance photographer from Muurla Folkhighschool.
Nevanlinna has been dancing with many choreographers in Helsinki and in New York, such as Deborah Hay, Rosane Chamecki & Andrea Lerner, Ariane Anthony, Tim Feldmann, Kirsi Monni, Katri Soini, Harri Kuorelahti and Paula Tuovinen among others. Nevanlinna’s last own choreography is a solo piece called V, which was performed with a live rock band in the famous rock club Tavastia in Helsinki and in Zodiak - Center for New Dance in 2006. One of her latest performances is a choreography to J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E Major with violin virtuoso Pekka Kuusisto.
She is a member of AV-Arkki - The Distribution Centre for Finnish Media Art. Her video artworks have been shown in the Boston Video Festival, Internationale tanzmesse in Düsseldorf and Sara Hilden Art Museum.
Nevanlinna has collaborated with sculptor Maria Duncker by making for ex. moving Camera Obscura-car rides and Camera Obscura discos. Duncker has made costumes for several of Nevanlinna's dance pieces. In addition to this she has collaborated with photographer Elina Brotherus and pianist Kristiina Junttu.
Nevanlinna has also played drums in the band Branded Women in 1999-2001. She has enjoyed one-year and half-year-grants from the National Council for Dance in Finland in 2002 and 2005. Nevanlinna is a member of the board of directors and the Artistic directors of Zodiak- Center for New Dance in Helsinki.
Amelia Reeber (U.S.) began her performance career in Seattle, Washington with a local circus troupe Circus Contraption. Soon after, at the age of 28, pursued a degree in Dance from the University of Washington. Although Amelia is a solo performing artist and choreographer, she has collaborated with and performed for many artists. As a founding member of Foot In Mouth, she had the opportunity to generate work with another choreographer and two composers as equal creative partners. Foot In Mouth performed throughout the Pacific Northwest states. As a solo choreographer her interests in time, the narrative of the body, and their relationship to space, landscape, and imagination, manifest as distinctive movement-based performance works. Improvisational performance is an additional avenue for her creative energies and attention.
In 2005, Amelia toured Vivian Girls with the Pat Graney Company. Throughout recent years she has also performed Deborah’s pieces Music, Beauty, and Mountain. The trio, Mountain, was performed with Gaelen Hanson and Peggy Piacenza and it, along with the solo adaptations, toured throughout the western United States in 2006/2007.
Currently Amelia is working on a dance film with Cascadia Film Collective (Cthulhu) that is an adaptation of a solo “Frank Hayes”, created and performed by Amelia for the stage in 2004. As an alternative to the usual audience/performer/venue relationship, Amelia has created a personalized solo project that seeks a more intimate context for performance by creating and performing a solo dance for an audience of one. This solo project is, in part, collaborative with the audience in that they will be able to make choices about the development of the works and will foster dialogue between two people through an artistic process. An evening length dance work is also in process and will premier in the autumn of 2008. Amelia’s work has been supported through grants, fellowships and residencies, via many organizations in the state of Washington.
