After years of working mostly with untrained performers, in 2004 Deborah Hay created a quartet for four experienced dancers – challenging them to more subtle instances of movement and performance. Hay is convinced that choreography doesn’t have to arise from particular forms of movement training, but from the intelligence of the whole body, and in “The Match” she composes simple or impossible actions to create an unusual dance. For this “wondrously strange and impermanent meditation on disintegration”, according to a panel of judges, she received the New York City Bessie Award. Cullberg has now adapted this important piece.

Deborah Hay (*1941) was a founding member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater and toured worldwide in 1964 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. For the last 30 years, she wrote and published while developing her own language for dance practice and choreography, which she applied in her work with both untrained and professional dancers. Commissioned works were produced by The Forsythe Company, Toronto Dance Theater and Cullberg Ballet, among others. Last year, MoMA opened their major exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done”, which features Hay’s work alongside that of her pioneering dance contemporaries Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and others.

Deborah Hay has been a guest at Tanz im August three times before, with “If I Sing to You” (2008), “No Time to Fly” (2012) and “Figure a Sea” (2016) with Cullberg. Cullberg is the national and international repertoire contemporary dance company in Sweden, continuously co-creating to make cutting edge dance relevant for the many. Together with choreographers from all over the world, we are exploring ideas on how dance can be defined, produced and presented. Those explorations are the pillars of a company that is constantly in motion at the heart of the international arena. Since 2019, Cullberg works exclusively with three associated artists: Alma Söderberg, Deborah Hay and Jefta van Dinther. The core of the company consists of 17 extraordinary individual dancers with a central role in the creations. Cullberg is led by artistic director Gabriel Smeets and managing director Stina Dahlström. Cullberg is a part of Riksteatern, The Swedish National Touring Theatre.
cullberg.com

[Source: play bill]

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