Deborah Hay papers

Deborah Hay, post-modern choreographer and author of books about the relationship between the human body and movement, was born 1941 in Brooklyn. Her mother was her first dance teacher; she moved to Manhattan in her early 20s to study with Merce Cunningham and Mia Slavenska. During this time, she was part of the experimental Judson Dance Theater, a group that developed postmodern dance. In 1967, she allowed a photograph of herself as a reclining nude to be modified into a greyscale computer image where different densities were converted into symbols. This image, Studies in Perception I, was printed in the New York Times on October 11, 1967.

Hay left Manhattan for Vermont in 1970 and spent the next six years writing and thinking about how dance is created and expressed. She moved to Austin, TX in 1976 where she put her thoughts into practice through yearly, 4-month workshops capped by large group public performances. In subsequent years, Hay has pushed the boundaries of dance through introspective solo works.

She collaborated with Mikhail Baryshnikov on a duet in 2000 and that same year published her third book, "My Body, The Buddhist," with Wesleyan University Press. A museum installation, “Perception Unfolds: Looking at Deborah Hay's Dance”, curated by Annette Carlozzi opened at the Blanton Museum in Austin, TX in February 2014. The installation later travelled to Yale Art Museum in New Haven, Connecticut. Hay continues her artistic contributions in 2021; Stockholm’s Culberg Company plans to premiere Horse choreographed by Hay with an original score by Austin-based composer/musician Graham Reynolds and lights and set by Amsterdam-based Finnish artist Minna Tikkainen.