Using the Sky. Deborah Hay

an answer is to narrow the immensity of the question.

      You are alone onstage and noticeably different from the person who was alone in the dressing room moments ago. Your body brought you to this stage. Here you shimmer. What if shimmering is how you experience time passing? Here and gone, here and gone, here and gone … with an emphasis on the here in the here and gone. Without words to describe it, what if your audience senses these shifting boundaries of your body?

      What if, as a counterpart to shimmering, you exercise your skills for undermining the ordinariness of time? As strong as your genetic and bodily responses to your inner pulse may actually feel, you operate like a jazz musician, who turns a song into an eclectic reconfiguration of notes and phrases that defy order, subvert the expected, and yet coalesce masterfully. Your experimentation questions automatic or naturally flowing movement, movement shaped by behavioral patterning that flows from all of us like a reservoir of training and acquired tastes, which lodge like a fashionable ski resort at the foot of a beautiful mountain in the Rockies or Alps, as the case may be.

      THE CHOREOGRAPHER’S CONFESSION

      Stage directions: I drop my manuscript and begin talking to the audience about the political crisis in the United States. I describe my inability to articulate my concerns about US policy, and I hear only my anger and rage. I am fully aware of how ineffective my arguments are under these conditions. I apologize for my lack of factual information and analysis and end with this remark: “Dance is my form of political activism. It is not how I dance or why I dance. It is that I dance.”

      CHOREOGRAPHER’S QUESTION

      FOR THE PERFORMER OF Beauty

      “What if every cell in your body has the potential to perceive beauty and to surrender beauty, simultaneously, each and every moment?”

      I signal the projectionist to start the video of o beautiful on the left screen, and I position myself, with a marker, beside the easel and pad. I hold both microphone and written score in my left hand and will gradually draw the floor pattern for the dance with my right, all the while reading from the written score. It is my intention to (1) get wound up in the microphone cord, (2) adjust my glasses frequently, (3) constantly negotiate holding and reading the manuscript and drawing at the same time, and (4) sing beautifully. The italicized phrases in the written score (below) are snippets from several patriotic American songs that I sing in the course of A Lecture.

      THE CHOREOGRAPHY