My Body, The Buddhist - Deborah Hay

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action, resourcefulness, and cultivation at once.

      1989: I invite being seen not being fixed in my fabulously unique three-dimensional body.

      (For comprehensive documentation of the workshops, see the list of performance practices included in this volume.)

      Koan-like in their spare summoning of full attentiveness, these statements acknowledge the constant changing of body in consciousness.

      Students in Hay’s classes spend anywhere from forty minutes to three hours experimenting individually and collectively with one such directive as the generative principle and conscious focus for dancing. Throughout their exploration, Hay speaks very little. Rather than stipulate or enforce a specific way of doing things, Hay encourages students to investigate on their own, and interactively with others, the myriad movements the directive inspires. As the convener of this group exploration, Hay offers occasional new perspectives from which to continue exploration. If, for example, they are investigating “Alignment is everywhere,” Hay might suggest the following ways of “playing” such a postulation:

      There is no one way alignment is everywhere looks or feels.

      The whole body at once is the teacher.

      Thank heaventz for the choice to play what if alignment is everywhere.

      Your teacher inspires mine.

      It doesn’t matter if it is true or not. Just notice the feedback when you play it.

      Hay reminds students that they are teaching themselves by attending rigorously to the body’s impulses. No body’s responses will look the same. Each body can inspire others. All bodies can and should delight in the marvelousness of practicing dancing.

      Compare this approach to dance training with a generic college-level dance class in either ballet or modern dance. Such a class stresses the body’s ability (and inability) to conform to specified shapes at a given time. The technically proficient body is one that accurately and efficiently responds to the specifications. Embedded in each shape and limited to each temporal phrasing is a hierarchization of body parts, a valuing of parts in relation to a whole, through which the aesthetic ideal is conveyed. The dancer works to master these shapings and timings and, through the process, learns what the body can and cannot do. The body succeeds or fails, becomes recalcitrant or insufficient. It functions in reactive response to the will being exerted over it.

      Hay’s approach, in contrast, constructs body as a site of exploration to which the dancer must remain vigilantly attentive. Body does not succumb to the dancer’s agency—striving, failing, mustering its resources to try again. Instead it playfully engages, willing to undertake new projects and reveal new configurations of itself with unlimited resourcefulness. Students receive no approval or criticism for engaging in these explorations, nor do they learn to hate the body for its inadequacies. Rather, they orient toward body as a generative source of ideas. Their reward comes less from mastering specific skills and more from the sense of the body unfolding as a site of infinite possibilities.

      The choreographic form of Hay’s dances coalesces out of the exploration of these same directives. (Her renowned trilogy The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom developed from the three images for 1987, 1988, and 1989 cited above.) Increasingly attentive to what the directive suggests, Hay and her students refine movement into similar shapes, repeatable actions, and identifiable phrases. For her large group dances, Hay coordinates the individual contributions of all participants, tuning them to the emerging score for the evening-length piece. For her solo pieces, Hay often extracts impulses from these variegated responses, sequencing them to suit a single body’s ability to elucidate the directive’s shaping of physicality. While developing one of her dances, Hay may enact distinct images that specify a shaping or quality of motion. But in taking on a shape or phrase, she is not evaluating body’s conformance to an ideal aesthetic. Rather, she works to open all parts of the body—all seventy-five trillion cells to the image, and at the same time she tunes to the dialogue between body and image, listening for what each might say to the other.

      Hay distinguishes between the practice of exploring the directives and choreography in this way:

      While practicing the directive, Hay makes certain choices and decisions, some of which she retains in subsequent practices so as to build an established sequence. She does not mold patterns of movement in order to express an image, but instead, selects from her dialogue between body and image impulses that most vividly reflect and amplify her experience of working with the image.

      Once the movement material has been choreographed so that it congeals in a reliably repeatable sequence of actions, Hay re-infuses the performance of the choreography with focus on the directive. Using the choreographic form as a kind of stable reference, she reanimates each action with consciousness of the practice that produced it. Earlier in her career, Hay worked with several such images in the making and performing of each piece, moving from one to the next as the choreography progressed. Over a ten-year period of conducting large group workshops, she reduced and distilled her practice of images to a single meditation directive that now presides over and and focuses each evening-length work. Throughout the creative process of practicing, training, making, and performing dances, Hay continues to listen to the dialogue between body and idea. It is this cyclical listening process that My Body, The Buddhist documents so effectively.

      Over the years, Hay’s investigation of bodiliness has resulted in remarkably distinctive dances. In Voilà (1995), for example, the dancer performs a twenty-five minute solo full of startling non sequiturs that nonetheless cohere around a dream she recounts several times during the dance. She then reiterates fragments from the dance as accompaniment to her recitation of a description of each movement’s intended meaning. In this diagnosis of the dance as part of the dance, movement’s meaning explodes into a marvelous profusion of semiotic possibilities. Hay’s analysis of each move shows it to signify both more and less than its conventional usage. Exit (1995), in contrast, elaborates on the dancer’s focus, on the ability of body and face to project a sense of moving into past or future over a seven-minute cross from one side of the stage to the other. The stunningly simple structure generates multiple resonances around the word exit.

      Hay’s script of Voilà, included in this volume, provides a wonderful documentation of the diverse images contained within the choreography, and the changes to their meanings that result from sequence and context. It also challenges as it expands our notions of how to notate dance by calling attention to many of the ways that movement can be described and characterized. Having witnessed the dance first in silence, viewers then re-view the dance accompanied by verbal description, all phrased in the past tense, even though the speaking dancer performs them at the same moment she describes them. Viewers see movements from the dance isolated and explained, as if the spoken text revealed what the choreographer was “really” thinking. Yet the descriptions emphasize very different aspects of the movement, and their sequence is preposterously nonlogical. Hay refers to some of her actions in terms of their kinesiological components: “An arm poised el-shaped in front of her face. The wrist hung loosely.” Other times, she emphasizes the metaphors movement can evoke: “She was a cartoon, playing horse and rider, but serious about the rules.” A glass of water she is drinking turns suddenly into a microphone and then into a horse’s tail. The varieties of description, the non sequiturs, and the use of past tense all unsettle the relationship between speech and action, underscoring the absurdity of the attempt to label movements, and ironizing the role of the choreographer as originator of movement’s meaning.

      At the same time, the talking creates a space full of conjectures and conjurings. It supports the dancer’s restless exploration, the trying out and on of images. Both the dancer and the description mean differently at different moments. The viewer soon realizes that there

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