Lamb at the Altar-P

＂The intention of my work is to dislodge assumptions about the fixity of the three-dimensional body.＂--Deborah Hay

Her movements are uncharacteristic, her words subversive, her dances unlike anything done before--and 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’s 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’s 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. She includes a movement libretto (a prose dance score) and numerous photographs by Phyllis Liedeker documenting the dance’s four-month emergence.
In 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--precise and mysterious, mental and physical--that 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.

Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Deborah Hay began her career with the Judson Dance Theater and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the 1960s. In the early 1970s she created a series of Ten Circle Dances, which were collected in the book Moving through the Universe in Bare Feet. Since 1976 she has lived in Austin, Texas, where she conducts annual large-group workshops, each lasting four months and culminating in public performances. She has performed and taught workshops in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and throughout the United States.