Where Home Is by Deborah Hay

Choreography and direction: Deborah Hay
Co-choreography, adaptation & performance: Stephanie McMann, Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley
Lighting Designer: Seth Rook Williams
Rehearsal assistant: Irma von Platen
Choreographic assistant: Laurent Pichaud
Music: Don't Fence Me In sung by Ella Jane Romero. Original song by Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher 
Production Manager: Hannah Blamire
Producer: Beckie Darlington
Camera: chameleoneyefilms
Trailer edit: Eleanor Sikorski
Duration: 30 min

'I am interested in choreography that does not look like anything and is performed by exceptionally astute and experienced dancers.
Their behavior disorienting, comfortingly spare, right in silence. Gone the predator, no do-gooders around, everything moves, inextricably bound.' - Deborah Hay 2018

In 2018 Nora commissioned Deborah Hay to make a piece for them. Where Home Is is a trio for three dancers, a trio in which the ‘trio’ is their home. They sing it, dance it, see it and find each other in it.  

The evening also includes Playing Audience, which happens after the performance of Where Home Is. The audience is guided through three different frames for watching dance. It is an opportunity to practice seeing movement from alternative perspectives. Where Home Is previewed at Yorkshire Dance, Leeds, on 30 November 2018. 

Playing Audience by Deborah Hay 

Concept: Deborah Hay
Adaptation: Stephanie McMann,Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley
Original adaptation: Irma von Platen
Duration: 15min approx.

Playing Audience happens after the performance of Where Home Is. It is a conversation, hosted by Nora, which guides the audience through three different frames for watching dance. Hay's process of making choreography involves multiple ‘what if’ questions which the dancers use to fuel their dancing. Playing Audience is an opportunity for the audience to experience these questions, to change how they see, and to practice watching movement from alternative perspectives.

Deborah Hay

Hay was born in Brooklyn. Her mother was her first dance teacher, and directed her training until she was a teenager. She moved to Manhattan in the 1960s, where she continued her training with Merce Cunningham and Mia Slavenska. In 1964, Hay danced with the Cunningham Dance Company during a 6-month tour through Europe and Asia. She was also sharing with her Judson colleagues the artificial distinction between trained and untrained performers. She focused on large-scale dance projects involving untrained dancers, fragmented and choreographed music accompaniment, and the execution of ordinary movement patterns performed under stressful conditions.

In 1970 she left New York to live in a community in northern Vermont. Soon, she distanced herself from the performing arena, producing Ten Circle Dances, performed on 10 consecutive nights within a single community and no audience whatsoever. Thus began a long period of reflection about how dance is transmitted and presented. Her first book, Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet (Swallow Press, 1975), is an early example of her distinctive memory/concept mode of choreographic record, and emphasizes the narratives underlining the process of her dance-making, rather than the technical specifications or notations of their form.
In 1976 Hay left Vermont and moved to Austin, Texas. Her attention focused on a set of practices ("playing awake") that engaged the performer on several levels of consciousness at once. While developing her concepts she instituted a yearly four-month group workshop that culminated in large group public performances and from these group pieces she distilled her solo dances. Her second book, Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (Duke University Press, 1994), documents the unique creative process that defined these works.
In the late 1990’s Deborah Hay focused almost exclusively on rarified and enigmatic solo dances based on her new experimental choreographic method, such as The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom, Voilà, The Other Side of O, Fire, Boom Boom Boom, Music, Beauty, The Ridge, Room, performing them around the world and passing them on to noted performers in the US, Europe, and Australia. Also, My Body, The Buddhist, her third book was published by Wesleyan University Press, 2000. It is an introspective series of reflections on the major lessons of life that she has learned from her body while dancing.
Hay conducted 14 annual Solo Performance Commissioning Projects from 1998 through 2012, first on Whidbey Island in Washington state and then at the Findhorn Community Foundation in Findhorn, Scotland. A film about this groundbreaking experiment, Turn Your F*^king Head, was made by Becky Edmunds in 2012. Rutledge Books produced and is now distributing this one hour documentary.
In 2002 Hay made a decision to apply what she had learned from 30 years of working with mostly untrained dancers to choreographing dances for experienced dancer/choreographers. In 2004 she received a NYC Bessie award for her quartet The Match. In 2006 she choreographed “O, O” for 5 New York City choreographer/dancers and then for 7 French dancers of comparable experience. The Festival d’Automne, in Paris, presented The Match in 2005, “O, O” in 2006, and If I Sing To You, in 2008, which was commissioned by The Forsythe Company and which toured extensively in Europe and Australia. In 2009 The Toronto Dance Theatre premiered her work, Up Until Now, and in 2010 Lightening premiered at the Helsinki Festival, a dance for 6 Finnish dancers/choreographers.
In October 2009 Deborah received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Dance from the Theater Academy in Helsinki, Finland and in 2010 she was awarded an US Artist Friends Fellowship and a 2011 artist’s grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, based in New York. In April 2012, Deborah Hay became one of the 21 American performing artists to receive the inaugural and groundbreaking 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.
After a two year research collaboration with Motion Bank, a project of the Forsythe Company directed by Scott delaHunta, an online interactive website dedicated to Hay's choreographic aesthetics was launched in June 2013. One outcome of that collaboration was Hay's first museum installation, Perception Unfolds: Looking at Deborah Hay's Dance, curated by Annette Carlozzi for the Blanton Museum in Austin, TX. The installation also travelled to Yale Art Museum in New Haven, CN.
Hay, in collaboration with Laurie Anderson and lighting designer Minna Tikkainen created an evening length work Figure a Sea, for 21 dancers and commissioned by the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm, Sweden. It premiered September 24, 2015.
May 5, 2015 France's Minister of Culture and Communication awarded Hay the title of CHEVALIER DE L'ORDRE DES ARTS ET DES LETTRES.
deborahhay.com

Nora Invites Deborah Hay was commissioned by Sadler's Wells, co-commissioned by DanceEast and Dance4 and supported by Independent Dance and using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

The practice of Where Home Is was kindly sponsored via Kickstarter by Mary Romanes, James & Tizy Wellesley Wesley, Jim & Sarah Sikorski, Teresa McMann, Geoffrey de Jager, Lucy & Guy Davison, Alasdair Romanes, Martin Shenfield, Susannah Wellesley Wesley, Alexandra Carey, Anne Greene, Michael & Maritza Wellesley Wesley, Charlie Ellingworth and Henrietta Griffiths; and supported by William Stevenson, Fi Walter, Richard Reynolds, Katy Wellesley Wesley, Nigel Pantling & Jean Sprackland, Patrick & Bim Cooper, Quentin Black & Ed Jardine, Alex & So Scott-Barrett and Nick & Felicity Lyons.