Using the Sky. Deborah Hay

Head.”

       introduction

      Everyone is consciously and unconsciously choreographed, by culture, gender, locale, politics, race, job, history, and so on. I came to appreciate the art of choreography pretty late in my career as a dance maker. It was 2001. I was with my brother, watching a video of Ros Warby performing her adaptation of my solo Fire, when he reached out his hand to touch my arm and said what I was thinking: “That’s who you want to work with.” Her sympathetic responsiveness to the language I had created to transmit the solo, including her practice of dis-attachment from those very same responses, was astounding. I knew immediately that I wanted to choreograph ensemble work for dancers whose artistic preferences, like Ros’s, inclined toward increasingly subtle instances of insight, irreverence, and revelation. I wanted to choreograph a spoken language that would inspire a shift in dance away from the illustrative body, despite its intense appeal to dancers and audiences alike, to a non-representational body.

      Creating language that can potentially stimulate sensually meaningful responses from this cellular entity has been the nature of my work for forty-five years. The translation of this feedback has been the core of my teaching, my personal practice, my experience of performance, and my writing. Yet how one perceives one’s cellular body is a rational, logistic, and analytic conundrum for anyone other than the individual willing to personally experiment with such a body.

      My dance practice continues to seek less stable instances of being, and I try to identify those capricious moments through the structure of language, working and reworking that language to best describe the learning taking place in my spewing multidimensional reconfiguring nonlinear embodiment of potentiality.

      It is this absurdly coherent information that feeds my attachment to dis-attaching from the posture of a single coherent person who dances.

      Or maybe my attraction to overseeing these infinitesimally brief instances of insight is because, as a choreographer and dancer, I am freed from needing to be creative. The surplus of perceived intelligence from my whole body at once far exceeds any additional input from me. My work then becomes how I choose to see while dancing.

      In 2013 I presented a performative talk at the TanzKongress in Düsseldorf, Germany. Although I was on a self-imposed sabbatical that year, I accepted the invitation in part because it was where and when the Motion Bank website, also titled Using the Sky, was to be released.

      To prepare for the TanzKongress I read through all of my dance journals since 2000, selecting passages that could illustrate how my dance language had evolved over a period of fifteen years. When that compilation was complete, Using the Sky: A Dance had begun.

       using the sky

       1 presume my story exaggerates

      Already drawn on a large white pad elevated on an easel are three separate bodies of information, on three separate sheets of paper, exhibited one at a time. I stand beside the easel and point to my drawing of a horse with a colorful cart being pulled along behind it and say something like, “I am the horse. The cart is my research.”

      I lift the paper and turn it over the top of the pad to reveal a second page:

      5 million cells and up—1970s

      800 billion cells—1990s

      More than a zillion cells—NOW

      50 billion cells—1980s

      50 trillion cells—2000s

      “The quantification of my research material is based on published data offered to me by students, Deepak Chopra types, friends, and even family,” I say. Under my breath but loud enough for people to hear, I remark that the list also illustrates the absurdity of my practice. I then fold that sheet of paper over the top of the pad to reveal a final page.

      a continuity of continuity

      a discontinuity of continuity

      a continuity of discontinuity

      “This is how I describe the evolution of my dance practice as I understand it now,” I say.

      A continuity of continuity is how those of us who are lucky enough begin life. We are hungry, we are fed. We are thirsty and we drink. We need to be held and are lifted into our mother’s arms. We want to dance, and we have Fred and Ginger, or hip-hop, or B Boys for influence. Or we have ballet. If we want to dance differently, we have modern dance teachers to emulate.

      FIGURE 1. Continuity drawing. © Deborah Hay, 2014.

      Another example of a continuity of continuity is a personal experience of symmetry. Years ago I was performing and teaching as part of a week’s residency at Skidmore College. I was invited to observe students from a dance composition class who were making work based on symmetry. I remember the beauteous feeling of satisfaction that the symmetry evoked as I watched the committed young dancers. A moment later I realized that my entire career was based on removing anything resembling symmetry from my dances.

      I point to the second line of the three listed on the large pad of paper. A discontinuity of continuity provides avenues for experimentation that lead to personal insight impossible to realize without risk-taking. It is a necessary step in understanding the power of choice and the recognition of one’s limitations. A discontinuity of continuity can also be dangerous, and I have a great example of that.

      About ten years ago, I wanted to see if I could unlearn an involuntary action and decided upon sneezing. I never told anyone I was doing this. It wasn’t until two years into this experiment that I noticed an annoying itch on the inside corner of my left eye every time I blew my nose. I realized I had ruptured a once-secure membrane that was probably created for the sole purpose of preventing nose blowers from subsequent eye itchiness. I am certain the rupture was a direct result of the fairly violent eruptions within my sinus cavity every time a sneeze happened. And some time later, following a workshop in Brussels at which I remember sneezing a lot, I was dining in a fancy airport hotel the evening before returning to Austin. My jaw locked while I was spooning French onion soup to my mouth. I returned to my room immediately. During the flight home the next day, without much range of movement in my jaw, I panicked, trying to place my head near the retractable tray in order to eat. After getting home, I immediately went to my dentist to be fitted for a bite guard, which eventually caused painful stiffness in my neck. The bite guard was soon in the garbage, and with the help of a massage therapist my normal jaw activity resumed, along with a commitment to return to my God-given right to sneeze. A dear friend, who never knew about my experiment, recently told me that on some occasions in local restaurants I would sneeze with such appalling sounds and spray that she considered not dining out with me again.

      Pointing to a continuity of discontinuity, I say, “How I arrived here is the context for my talk.”

      Until the age of twenty-five I held these beliefs about myself:

      Dance technique was not something I could bring myself to master. My intellect, my thinking mind, was fallow.

      I did not know how, nor was I motivated, to engage in research. To this day, I do not know how to use a library.

      Ten years later, paralleling the decentralization of my three-dimensional body into a cellular one whenever I danced, I had unintentionally replaced the need to master a way of moving with a body that was now a site for inquiry. Dance became a way for me to learn without thinking, which in turn diminished my fear of not being smart. The attraction to and the determination to keep noticing my cellular body as my teacher showed no sign of weakening. If methodology or attainment were my goal, there would be a fundamental absurdity to my research. How could noticing feedback from five million or a zillion cells possibly compute? How would I even do it? Without a technique to master or a predictable outcome to my dancing, the only evidence I had to support my research was the fact that I continued to learn