Читать книгу Using the Sky - Deborah Hay - Страница 10

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.