The Deborah Hay Dance Company.THE DEBORAH HAY DANCE COMPANY DANSPACE PROJECT Danspace Project was founded in 1974 to provide a performance venue for experimental dance. Its performances are held in St. Mark's Church in the East Village area of the Manhattan borough of New York City. AT ST. MARK'S CHURCH St. Mark's Church may mean:
New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. FEBRUARY 5-8, 2004 Reviewed by Gus Solomons jr. What is Deborah Hay doing? Her dancers grunt and crawl a around on hands and knees, gesticulate ges·tic·u·late v. ges·tic·u·lat·ed, ges·tic·u·lat·ing, ges·tic·u·lates v.intr. To make gestures especially while speaking, as for emphasis. v.tr. To say or express by gestures. madly, talk in nonsense language, and twist their faces into grimaces. But describing what the dancers do tells nothing of what they're doing. Hay is a wizard at finding cues--word instructions, stories, images--that allow her performers to discover unexpected kinetic depths in themselves. Hay cut her choreographic teeth with the Judson Dance Theater Judson Dance Theater located at the Judson Memorial Church, New York the group of artists that formed Judson Dance Theater are considered the founders of Postmodern dance. The theater grew out of a dance composition class taught by Robert Dunn, a musician who had studied with John experimenters and toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1964. Now Austin-based, she explores leer singular vision of dance as a practice of human action, making large winks for untrained dancers--some not even meant for an audience to see--and solos for herself and others. Her dances are notated and recalled through the narratives that underlie the process, rather than specific movements. For The Match, Hay worked daily for a month with four arresting performers, inventing a brilliantly eccentric dance for each: Wally Cardona's release sensibility is powered by Juilliard-trained technique; Mark Lorimer Lor´i`mer n. 1. A maker of bits, spurs, and metal mounting for bridles and saddles; hence, a saddler. declaims like all eager poet with a mouthful of pebbles; Chrysa Parkinson twitches long, spidery limbs; and Ros Warby is a crunchy-granola seductress se·duc·tress n. A woman who seduces. See Usage Note at -ess. Noun 1. seductress - a woman who seduces seducer - a bad person who entices others into error or wrongdoing . In performance each dancer appears in a different solo each night, and the hour long dance is woven together with group passages in which all the dancers seem to be executing the same instructions, but with their own movement choices. Jennifer Tipton's lighting continually reshapes the space with deceptively simple white light. The dancers' dedication to Hay's process radiates through their moving bodies; they surprise and amuse us with the profound simplicity and directness of their actions. And hay's imagination stimulates ours as we watch. The process continues after these performances, as the dancers continue daily practice of the material on their own to turn it into individual solos. See www.deborahhay.com |
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