Deborah Hay
| Deborah Hay | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1941 Brooklyn |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Performance art, Choreography, Dancing |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship |
Deborah Hay is an experimental choreographer working in the field of postmodern dance, and one of the founding members of the Judson Dance Theater.
Deborah Hay was born in 1941 in Brooklyn. Her mother was her first dance teacher and directed her training until she was a teenager.
She moved to Downtown, Manhattan in the 1960s, where she continued her training with Merce Cunningham and Mia Slavenska. She was part of the collective of dancers, composers, and visual artists who performed at the Judson Memorial Church and became known as the Judson Dance Theater; experimentalists who rejected the confines of Modern dance practice and theory, inventing the precepts of Postmodern dance.
In 1964, Hay danced with the Cunningham and Dance Company during a 6-month tour through Europe and Asia. She was also sharing with her Judson colleagues the artificial distinction between trained and untrained performers. 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 October 1966 she along with other artists worked with Bell Labs computer experts in collaborative performances, that led to the creation of a seminal piece of art, Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon's Studies in Perception #1, an image of a reclining nude using typographic symbols for halftone densities. This image of Deborah Hay was printed in The New York Times on 11 October 1967, and exhibited at one of the earliest computer art exhibitions, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, held Museum of Modern Art in New York City in from November 25, 1968 through February 9, 1969.
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.
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