Cullberg Ballet in Deborah Hay’s Figure A Sea at Southbank Centre

Cullberg Ballet, Figure a Sea, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, September 6

In Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, The Monk by the Sea (1809), a diminutive figure stands on a seashore facing the horizon. The viewer observes the observer at a distance, removed from the scene and at the same time vicariously present in it. Such an image resonates with Deborah Hay’s Figure a Sea (2015), choreographed for Cullberg Ballet — where Hay is one of three associate artists — who perform it at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on a welcome visit to London.   

The bare stage is defined only by lighting designer Mimma Tiikkainen’s white rectangle of light and a white backdrop. Divided in three groups in Marita Tiämström’s costumes, Cullberg Ballet’s seventeen dancers respond to some unspoken tasks by exploring the emergence and dissipation of movement either in isolation or in couples and trios. They sit or stand still, with only the slightest tilt of the head; they embrace each other then move apart; they walk each in their own specific and singular way of lifting one foot in front of the other and putting it back down, or creating a dance sequence that another dancer reciprocates through her own variations, their hands at times held in front of them like imaginary mirrors. They freeze a posture as if posing for a long-exposure photograph, or seamlessly continue the trajectory started by the kinetic energy of a movement till fully exhausted as they follow the rhythm of their own murmuring voices or that of the changing cadences and vibrations of Laurie Anderson’s soundtrack that in turn emerges and dissipates like waves. The effect is of a kaleidoscope of varying patterns, forms and images that shift across the stage or happen at either side, each distinctive but also expansively related to each other. 

Hay describes Figure a Sea as ‘a meditation on seeing. Seeing music, fleeting incidences and synchronicities, unbelievable unexpectedness and, most surprising – seeing the unnameable. It is a space for seeing oneself seeing’. In meditation, to see oneself seeing suggests the immersive experience of feeling movement, touch and hearing, of ‘seeing’ what the sensations and emotions of incidences feel like without lingering on possible narratives or meanings. Hence, ‘synchronicities’, ‘unbelievable unexpectedness’ and even ‘the unnameable’ are characterised by the uniqueness of the observer’s experiencing and feeling as a state in which one is both the subject and object of the observation. Quantum physics underlines the importance of such a point of view, positing that an event is intrinsically determined by the observer, since any observation is the result of a subjective response and the observer partakes of the very unfolding of experience. By offering us a meditation on seeing, Hay thus makes us the removed participant of its very articulation. She takes us to the core of what French scholar Michel Serres refers to as ‘the knot of the sensible’, where all the senses converge in the very act of seeing that Serres understands in terms of movement; this is the way Hay asks us to see, to observe, to be present. What we see and what we feel depends on our willingness to enter the realm of the sensible and to figure what sea of possibilities can fill an empty white space, to see the emergence of motion in stillness and stillness in the endless flux of movement that makes space and time. 

Figure a Sea ends with the dancers leaving the stage one by one, until only one remains; as the lights gradually dim, she also leaves. The white rectangle seems to flicker like the surface of the sea and a shadow divides the backdrop in half. It is as if Friedrich’s painting has been projected back to the audience, and now we are the figure looking out into infinity. 

Nora invites Deborah Hay – Where Home Is

Nora invites Deborah Hay – Where Home Is, Lilian Baylis Theatre, April 25 

“One never reaches home,’ she said. ‘But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.” – Herman Hesse

Nora is dancers Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley and Stephanie McMann. Sikorski and Wellesley Wesley were previously a duo who in 2015 invited Liz Aggiss, Simon Tanguy, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion to make an evening of duets for them. With the addition of McMann their performance, staging and presence has shifted entirely. McMann has worked with a number of choreographers including Roberta Jean and Theo Clinkard; she has a beguiling and luminous presence that draws attention. The two bodies of Sikorski and Wellesley Wesley have a clear relationship with their previous invitees; with the trio on stage the reading becomes a little trickier. They define themselves as a dancer-led company; I get a sense they are collectors of a certain type of choreographer whose work has a conceptual pedigree but that is not averse to niche mass appeal. In November 2018 Nora worked with Deborah Hay to create a performance entitled Where Home Is which forms the first part of the evening followed by Playing Audience, a short conversational invitation to the audience to reconsider how we experience dance.

Hay is a scrambler, an unsettler, a not-dancer, a re-framer and Nora revel in her environment. In the thirty-five minutes of Where Home Is there is acres of attentional space for an audience to approach the work, be with it, ignore it, drift elsewhere or come back; it will give you what you give to it, but you have to give first. Located closer to choreographic performance art, Hay doesn’t often treat Nora as a trio but more like three ones with the odd two plus one; the interconnectedness and relational quality of the three isn’t present. Our visual grid is populated by solo components; we have buckets of almost still poses, Sikorski’s presentational arches, McMann’s faux cockney encouragement and Wellesley Wesley’s scenographic inspections. There are moments that face outward with Sikorski and McMann almost goading Wellesley Wesley with false hyperbole and exaggerated encouragement as she attempts to execute a series of stuttering classical moves and travelling sequences. This three-minute interjection offers an alternative emotional palette and a chance for the audience to laugh, release and enjoy.

The notion of home is an interesting one; these three dancing bodies are now a temporary home for Hay’s score. They are respectful and practiced guardians of the work, keeping it inside and between them. Nora is home and Nora is together thanks in part to a three-week period prior to the premiere working with rehearsal support from Rachel Krische who was herself a receiver of a Deborah Hay solo, The Swimmer, over 10 years ago. 

There are echoes of early Probe where two exceptional dancers — Antonia Grove and Theo Clinkard — invited choreographers including Lea Anderson, Rafael Bonachela, Yasmeen Godder and Trisha Brown to make work on them in Have We Met Somewhere Before (2005) and Magpie (2008). Over three years Probe collected 11 choreographers who made them look exquisite, squeezing the juice out of their technique and their relationship as a duo. They allowed space for themselves, their choreographic collective as well as for the audience. 

Playing Dance lasted for 20 minutes with each performer asking a question which might reframe how the audience receives the work: “What if, as audience, I remember to recognise time is passing? Time is not fixed.” Playing Dance became part of the evening because when Hay was making the work with Nora in Nottingham she would spend the mornings with the trio and each afternoon rehearsing her own solo work, leaving Nora to look at, reframe and process the choreographic questioning of Hay’s What ifs.

Where Home Is is a score that is practiced and it would be the same with or without our presence; this was reiterated after the pause during Playing Dance where the audience is told “This is not feedback for us, we don’t care, this is a space for a you.” An audience is already the guest of the presenting artist; individuals come to the theatre having purchased tickets and give their attention in exchange. Nora’s exchange ratio of performer to audience this evening is around 1 to 55, so we received 1/55 of a transmitted Deborah Hay and I left wanting more. Nora invites Deborah Hay but Nora does not invite the audience. 

Dance, Mathematics and Deborah Hay

Deborah Hay at Independent Dance and Sir Ken Robinson at TED

Deborah Hay

Another fortuitous confluence of ideas: driving home one morning last week I heard part of an interview with Sir Ken Robinson. I was captivated by his articulate and confident championing of creativity in education and, as an example, of dance as a subject with equal importance to mathematics. ‘We are not brains on a stick,’ he pointed out with characteristic wit. ‘We are embodied…Our physical condition, how we relate to ourselves physically, is of fundamental importance in our sense of self.’ Robinson was once on the board of the Royal Ballet, but he is not promoting his special interest nor is he being merely controversial. He is making the point that any educational syllabus suffocates creativity because of the way it promotes certain subjects over others. In a TED talk in 2006 he said, ‘There isn’t an educational system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics…As children grown up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads…’ He cites the example of Gillian Lynne who was not happy at regular school until her mother was encouraged to take her to dance school where she discovered people like her who couldn’t sit still, who had to move to think.

Robinson’s talk has been viewed over 28 million times unsurprisingly, but I began to wonder how Robinson’s vision for dance could be embodied in a syllabus without getting stymied by the insistence of this style over that, or this school of technique over another.

At the end of the week I attended a showing, through the initiative of Independent Dance, of Becky Edmunds’ documentary Turn Your Fucking Head at Siobhan Davies Studio. Edmunds’ film documents the final Solo Performance Commissioning Solo taught by Deborah Hay to a group of twenty dancers at the Findhorn Community Foundation in which Hay’s frequent incitement to ‘turn your fucking head’ is her more mischievous version of ‘think outside the box’. Hay was present and following the film gave a talk on the process of her research. Hay does not associate herself with any style; she comes from the American dance revolution that bubbled to the surface at Judson Church in New York in the 60s and she subsequently worked with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, both of whom influenced her thought processes. By the end of the talk, which spanned the last ten years of her research diary suffused with a lifetime experience, I felt confident Hay’s approach is what Robinson may have had in mind when suggesting dance could be taught at the same level as mathematics. One caveat: at the beginning Hay discloses with a wry smile that her research is ‘impossible’. She doesn’t teach, she questions. ‘Questions are made to expand the way we perceive; they are not questions to be answered.’ The material for her syllabus consists of the number of cells in the body. In the 1970s it was thought there were five million cells, which was more manageable than the zillion or so now, but dance, in Hay’s universe, is the interaction of these cells with time and space. ‘I replace movement with my understanding of time and space.’ What our mind (wherever it is) can bring to this interaction is responsible for the individuality of our responses. If there is a pitfall in Hay’s approach, it is that students may feel drawn to imitate the kind of dance Hay herself embodied, as if the form belongs to the process. This would be anathema to Hay; turn your fucking head, after all, is a militant call to focus on our own bodies, not someone else’s. ‘Focusing on my own body is dance; focusing is bound by time and space. Noticing is not.’ She talks with self-deprecating humour, not suggesting for a moment that she has any answers at all, but what she wants to instill is the freedom of the body to express itself in movement without worrying about getting it wrong. ‘Dance is how I learn without thinking.’

Sign me up.