Exhibit Curator
Dates: February 4, 2023 – August 20, 2023
Venue: Harry Ransom Center

Internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer Deborah Hay (b. 1941) was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, a group of dancers and choreographers in New York City who sought to break free from the traditional constraints of classical ballet and modern dance. For over fifty years, she has pioneered new ways of creating performance. Four of Hay’s dance scores drawn from her archive reveal how she has documented and extended the artistic practice of her choreography.

The Scores

by Deborah Hay, 2023

I cannot read music. I cannot read dance notation. I think dance sketches are pointless although I can imagine some are powerful. I have seen enough of my work on video to know it does not speak for the experience of dancing it. 

I decided to pick up the pen and write my dances. Many of my scores were written after a work was performed in public. I began to describe a dance from my audience perspective and mixed that up by combining this with my experience dancing it. I understood that writing a dance added to my experience dancing it, and vise versa. 

I did not like the idea that I felt limited by what I thought a score should be so I score dances on my terms, something I can understand, not something I can follow or ‘get’ but something to inspire my participation in the sequence of movement material as it unfolds.I think of the scores as wanting to shed light on the human body and its potential. More directly, of including the dancer’s perspective, an audience’s perspective, and a choreographer’s perspective as well. The scores can perhaps be seen as an artist’s mapping of the experience of a dance.