Prophet of contemporary dance is honored in her own home

Deborah Hay might be Austin's most famous artistic resident, but many Austinites would not recognize her name. A prolific choreographer and thinker, Hay has made dance in Austin since 1976. Despite her vast artistic achievements, stretching back to her work with the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, today Hay is better known in Europe and New York than in her adopted hometown.

This week, the University of Texas Center for Women and Gender Studies hosts a performance and symposium with the goal of raising Hay's local visibility. On Wednesday night, Hay will perform her newest solo, "No Time to Fly," at the Long Center for the Performing Arts' Rollins Studio Theatre. (The event, which is technically sold out, is Hay's only public performance in Austin in more than five years, although the Fusebox Festival presented Hay's duet "Room" in 2007.)

On Thursday, a huge cross section of the international dance community — including performers and choreographers who have worked with Hay, producers who have presented Hay's work and dance critics who have written about Hay's work — will gather at the Blanton Museum of Art to discuss Hay's contributions. The performance has been sold out for weeks but the symposium remains open to the public.

Sue Heinzelman, director of the Center for Women and Gender Studies, says Hay's exclusion from Austin's radar stems from the university's propensity to ignore important local figures.

"If Deborah was in New York, she'd be invited down all the time, but she's too local and that somehow lessens her value," says Heinzelman.

Yet Europe's and New York's dance communities — particularly since Mikhail Baryshnikov included Hay's work in his White Oak Dance Project's Judson celebration in 2000 — have shown Hay great love. In March she premiered "No Time to Fly" at New York's Danspace Project as part of a series, curated by dancer/choreographer Juliette Mapp, dedicated to artists important to New York.

Hay grew up in Brooklyn, where her mother was her first dance teacher. She was a founding member of Judson, the group of dancers and choreographers who famously questioned the very definition of dance. The group, which included Yvonne Rainier and Trisha Brown, broadened the category of dance, arguing that walking or running might be just as much a dance as whipping off a triple pirouette.

Hay continued to hone her expansive approach to making and thinking about dance after leaving New York, first for Vermont in 1970, then Austin in 1976. Dance historian Susan Foster, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the keynote speaker at Thursday's symposium, describes Hay's work as "visionary" for its view of dance.

"It's the whole idea that dance is a process, not a product," says Foster. "Dance requires an ongoing and sustained commitment — a quality of attentiveness to one's everyday living."

For Hay, dance is not just a series of choreographed moves presented in performance. When working on "No Time to Fly," Hay says, she spent two hours a day, five days a week practicing the 50-minute piece over and over, working to increase her ability to be physically perceptive. Such intense repetition coupled with Hay's concept of dancing with every cell in the body at every moment results in captivating, dense performances.

"To me, performance is a place of alertness to everything I could possibly be alert to," says Hay. "To do this uninterrupted for a length of time is a great chore."

For dancers trained in ballet or even modern dance, the skills of perception Hay insists upon can be overwhelming or even cryptic.

Mapp, who danced in Hay's critically acclaimed recent pieces "O,O" and "If I Sing to You," says working with Hay is a process of "letting go and embracing a whole new set of ideas. She just keeps insisting on going back to the body. There's a great play between the body and the mind, and you have to keep going back to find out what the body can do."

Hay's talk about "the body" sometimes gets dismissed as too abstract. Reflecting on "Single Duet," which Baryshnikov performed with Hay in 2000, Baryshnikov told New York Times dance critic Claudia LaRocco, "Of course when (Hay) talks about her work, I never know what the hell she's talking about."