Using the Sky : a dance

Deborah Hay choreographs ensemble work for dancers who are interested in insight, irreverence, and revelation. Her aim is to choreograph a spoken language and inspire a shift in dance, away from the illustrative body, to a non-representational body. In this, her fourth book, Hay meditates on dance, how to negotiate between mind and body, and how to communicate subjective experience in an objective world.

In the mid 1990’s Deborah Hay’s work took a new turn. From her early experiments with untrained dancers, and after a decade of focusing on solo work, the choreographer began to explore new grounds of choreographic notation and transmission by working with experienced performers and choreographers.

Using the Sky: a dance follows a similar path as Hay’s previous books—Lamb at the Altar and My Body the Buddhist—by exploring her unrelenting quest for ways to both define and rethink her choreographic imagery through a broad range of alternately intimate, descriptive, poetic, analytical and often playful engagement with language and writing.

This book is a reflection on the experiments that Hay set up for herself and her collaborators, and the ideas she discovered while choreographing four dances, If I Sing to You (2008), No Time to Fly (2010), A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty (2003), and the solo My Choreographed Body (2014).

The works are revisited by unfolding a trove of notes and journal entries, resulting in a dance score in its own right, and providing an insight into Hay’s extensive legacy and her profound influence on the current conversations in contemporary performance arts.