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IMPRESSIONS: Deborah Hay's Performance Club at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park's 2025 Annual Festival
By Catherine Tharin
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Published on September 29, 2025
Deborah Hay in Performance Club. Photo by Theo Cote
PART I
Kaatsbaan Cultural Park's 2025 Annual Festival
Deborah Hay’s Performance Club
Black Box Theater, Studio Complex
Michèle Steinwald, 2025 Annual Festival Guest Curator
September 13, 2025, afternoon
Choreographer and performer Deborah Hay, wearing her hair in a long, white braid with a tufted end tossed over one shoulder, addresses the Saturday-afternoon attendees who are seated on chairs and pillows in a wide semi-circle on the edge of Kaatsbaan's indoor stage. She introduces the event as a “prototype for Performance Club,” like a book club or a fan club. Ideally, participants gather to watch consecutive live performances, and then discuss the changes they observe, since, as Hay puts it, “a choreographic body changes every day.”
Hay will perform a 20-minute solo in silence, ending when a hand-held instrument, a Vibraslap, whirls. Then, for 40 minutes, we will respond in our own ways to the solo and the shifting energy of the room. Hay explains, “It’s your experience. You don’t impose it on anyone else. I do the solo. You hear the sounds (in the room). We’re done,” she explains. Hay, an octogenarian, began her career in the 1960s with the experimental Judson Dance Theater, a democratic group that claimed any movement, game, or task was fodder for performance. She frames what follows as an open-ended response.
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Hay’s solo is meditative, with ambling walks, slight tilts, and long pauses. She is dressed in a dark blouse open from wrists to shoulders, that gently ruffles when she moves. Hands poised on her hips, she pliés in second position, head twitching. She stretches her arms and tucks them in like wings. Rhythmic prances bring her inches from the audience. She melts to the floor. Her fingers fan and flicker. Her hips undulate forward and back as she sings guttural, invented words: “Curio leo (grunt, grunt), oh, reeos brise rayose, cheera, ohhhh.”
At other times, the silence, punctuated only by the squeak of her sneakers and the drone of the lights, sharpens our attention to every gesture. Moments of fleeting levity thread through her movements, along with reverie, melancholy, and focus. Her shoulders turn inward, and she tilts her head until her chin meets her chest. Now, it’s our turn.
Some write. Some close their eyes. Some stir. The first thing I notice: the two people to my right, the two to my left, and I all cross our legs right over left, like a quiet chorus line in unison. Hay sits down, and crosses her legs as well.
A gray-haired woman lifts herself off her chair and settles into a wide Graham fourth position onstage. Folding forward and back, she exclaims, “Ishi kala.”
A young man rises from his chair, and then sits. He stands again, and goes to take a seat on the stage. He pushes to his feet once more, typing on his phone. A mother and daughter mirror one another in a slow, connected duet, fingers gently touching the sides of each other’s necks.
I dance behind the seated group, where others are sprawled, my movements quick and horizontal. Afterward, when I step out of the darkened theater, a bright, welcoming light greets me; and the air is fresh; the trees are green. An unexpected gift from Deborah Hay: I feel so happy and free.
PART II
Turn Everywhere: Deborah Hay on Film/In Person
Black Box Theater, Studio Complex
In conversation with Michèle Steinwald, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park 2025 Annual Festival Guest Curator
Films: Turn Your F^king Head (2012, 62 minutes, Becky Edmunds) | Alignment is everywhere (2019, 22 minutes, Peter Humble and David Young)
September 13, 2025
The evening’s film screening extends the resonance from the afternoon. The first film, Turn Your F^king Head (2012), documents the final iteration of Hay’s Solo Performance Commissioning Project at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. Over ten days, dancers from eleven countries, ranging in age from their early twenties to mid-career, work under Hay’s demanding direction to learn her latest solo, Dynamic, which they then commit (by signing a contract) to practice daily for nine months before performing. If a day is missed, you start over.
“There’s no time for judgment,” Hay says, emphasizing the intensity of the work. The transmission acts as an “antidote for habits that no longer serve you.”
This isn’t training in the traditional sense. Participants are asked to change the way they perceive and engage with movement, making a practice of the dance so it stays alive. The emphasis is on cultivating awareness and presence rather than on perfecting steps, marking a philosophical, rather than technical, shift.
The second film, Alignment is everywhere (2019), is more intimate. Its grainy, crackling film stock underscores the unease of its subject matter, though Hay herself does not approach death with discomfort. Visiting the home of a recently deceased friend, she reflects on aging, dying, and staying alert to the world. She plans to compost her body. “I like the idea of serving a tree,” she says. She speaks, too, about her life, recalling a cold marriage, the freedom of communal living, and the challenges of raising a child while inventing a path outside mainstream dance. “My work,” she says, “is about how to survive, and not go down with the ship.”
After the screening, Hay asks each in the audience to summarize their experience in one word. “Honesty,” “attentiveness,” and “acceptance” were some responses, though one audience member recalled the “duck” movement sequence from the film with a delighted smile.
For Hay, choreography is not a sequence of steps but the shaping of attention, a continual resetting of one’s relationship to time, space, and the body. She expands on this perspective in conversation with her former student, and inspired guest curator Michèle Steinwald. During the dialogue, Hay turns the focus outward, speaking about the vast universe, about particles of consciousness, and how unknowable forces affect our bodies.
“We are living the cosmic joke, folks,” she says, with dry amusement, “that we think we know anything.”
The Performance Club left me feeling surprisingly buoyant. The films extended that sensation into something more anchored, reinforcing that dance can be both playful and exacting, and that rigor doesn’t have to be control. Awareness and the willingness to notice and respond, or not, as you choose, is at the heart of Hay’s choreography.
