“The intention of my work is to dislodge assumptions about the fixity of the three-dimensional body.”\u2014Deborah Hay
\nHer movements are uncharacteristic, her words subversive, her dances unlike anything done before\u2014and this is the story of how it all works. A founding member of the famed Judson Dance Theater and a past performer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Deborah Hay is well known for choreographing works using large groups of trained and untrained dancers whose surprising combinations test the limits of the art. Lamb at the Altar is Hay\u2019s account of a four-month seminar on movement and performance held in Austin, Texas, in 1991. There, forty-four trained and untrained dancers became the human laboratory for Hay\u2019s creation of the dance Lamb, lamb, lamb . . . , a work that she later distilled into an evening-length solo piece, Lamb at the Altar. In her book, in part a reflection on her life as a dancer and choreographer, Hay tells how this dance came to be.
\nShe includes a movement libretto (a prose dance score) and numerous photographs by Phyllis Liedeker documenting the dance\u2019s four-month emergence.
\nIn an original style that has marked her teaching and writing, Hay describes her thoughts as the dance progresses, commenting on the process and on the work itself, and ultimately creating a remarkable document on the movements\u2014precise and mysterious, mental and physical\u2014that go into the making of a dance. Having replaced traditional movement technique with a form she calls a performance meditation practice, Hay describes how dance is enlivened, as is each living moment, by the perception of dying and then involves a freeing of this perception from emotional, psychological, clinical, and cultural attitudes into movement. Lamb at the Altar tells the story of this process as specifically practiced in the creation of a single piece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AUTHOR: Deborah Hay
\nPUBLISHER: Duke University Press (1994)<\/p>\n
SOFTCOVER: 136 pages
\nLANGUAGE: English
\nISBN: 978-0-8223-1439-4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":45499,"template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[135,240,149],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-45500","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-english-en","7":"product_cat-choreography-en","8":"product_cat-contemporary-dance-en","10":"first","11":"outofstock","12":"taxable","13":"shipping-taxable","14":"purchasable","15":"product-type-simple"},"yoast_head":"\n