VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

In collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), the Mitchell Center will bring legendary choreographer and artist Deborah Hay to Houston for a lecture and performance, Saturday, October 2. Hay will present  Lecture on the Performance of Beauty, a performance/lecture framed around the question: "Can a formal and stimulating adherence to a prescribed set of hypothetical conditions be seen as choreography even if there is no learned movement?"

This event is in conjunction with the CAMH exhibition Dance with Camera. The exhibition explores a crossover between artists and dancers who create choreography for the camera.

Deborah Hay (pictured, Photo Credit Rino Pizzi ©2010) was born in 1941 in Brooklyn. She moved to New York City in the 1960s, where she was a member of a group of experimental artists deeply influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The group, later known as the Judson Dance Theater, became one of the most radical and explosive forces in 20th-century art, giving birth to Postmodern Dance.

Following her years in New York, Hay moved to Vermont in 1970 where her experience in a quiet community there helped her synthesize ideas of dance into a minimal concept, ethically and aesthetically grounded on the principle that less is more. To this day she makes dances without a linear structure. Instead she creates conditions for a direct experience of all kinds of phenomena. In those phenomena are the interpretive keys to the performance and understanding of each dance.

Hay has presented Lecture on the Performance of Beauty in London in 2003 and describes the work in the provocative question, "What if every cell in your body has the potential to perceive beauty and surrender beauty, at once, each and every moment?"

Now in her 70s, Hay's career has seen a resurgence over the last decade. She performs and teaches all over the world, writes extensively, and has published several articles and three books, including Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet (Swallow Press, 1975), Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (Duke University Press, 1994), and My Body, The Buddhist (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), an introspective series of reflections on the major lessons of life that she has learned from her body while dancing.

She runs the Deborah Hay Dance Company in Austin, Texas.

LOCATION: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose Blvd.

ADMISSION: Free.