Deborah Hay, Solo

Solo of Deborah Hay, represented on 13 and 23 October 1966, is not strictly a solo but a choreographic show for 16 dancers, 8 unmanned platforms and their operators.

Solo by Deborah Hay, performed on October 13th and 23rd 1966, is not really a solo but rather a choreographic work for 16 dancers, 8 tele-guided platforms and their operators. However, each dancer seems to follow a solitary path that only episodically crosses that of the others, when he/she is not alone on a platform.

At the origin of this performance is a trip to Japan, made during a tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Impressed by Noh theatre, Deborah Hay wished to integrate into her work the slowness, simplicity and suspension specific to the Japanese tradition. The dancer, who has regularly collaborated with Steve Paxton, Robert Rauschenberg and her husband Alex Hay, offers here one of the most minimalist performances of 9 Evenings. However, its minimalism does not lack humour. At the edge of the track, a conductor directs the operators responsible for controlling the platforms on which the dancers rise up or sink down. Seated beneath giant antennas, these operators assume the appearance of impassive typists. As for the dancers, they seem to form a cloud of atoms with an uncertain trajectory. Their economy of movement reaches its climax when it is the platforms that move them across the stage, dignified as Apollos or stiff as planks. 

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi