If I Sing to You / Spiraling Down

Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer

• Baryshnikov Arts Center
• 450 W. 37th Street
• Tuesday, November 17 - Thursday, November 19, 7:30pm

Two legendary old friends–Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer–present two new performances on the same evening, sharing a stage for the first time in over 25 years. Deborah Hay’s “If I Sing To You,” featuring an all-star cast of New York-based female performer/choreographers, is about how a dance can become a seamless song that arises from the gaps between multiple choregraphic instances, and where movement and voice keep surfacing to lead our conciousness through an authentic experience of time. Yvonne Rainer’s “Spiraling Down” draws its inspiration from a variety of sources—including newspaper photos, soccer moves, old movies, classic modern dance, ballet, Steve Martin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Rainer’s own disinterred dances from the 1960s—all of which contribute to the melancholic and contradictory subtext of this new dance.

Yvonne Rainer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer, was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater (1962) and the improvisational group Grand Union (1970-76). Some of her major choreographic works are “The Mind is a Muscle” (1968), “Continuous Project-Altered Daily” (1970), and “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” (2000, commissioned by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project). Beginning with “Lives of Performers” (1972), she produced and directed seven feature-length films, including “Privilege” (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival and the GeyerWerke Prize at the 1991 International Documentary Film Festival, Munich) and “MURDER and murder” (1996,winner of the Teddy Award at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival and a “Special Jury Award” at the 1999 Miami Lesbian and Gay Film Festival). Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, three Rockefeller Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Wexner Prize, and four Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees. She has authored four books: Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961-73; The Films ofYvonne Rainer; A Woman Who…: Essays, Interviews, Scripts; and, most recently, a memoir, Feelings Are Facts: aLife. Rainer is currently teaching at the University of California, Irvine, as a Distinguished Professor of StudioArt.

Deborah Hay (b. Brooklyn, 1941) was one the founding members of the Judson Dance Theater in New York, and is acknowledged by critics and historians as one of the most relevant and influential representatives of post-modern dance. She has collaborated with visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Hay, Tina Girouard, and Carolee Schneemann, with composers Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, and Terry Riley, and with choreographers Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Steve Paxton, among others. She has also worked closely with Australian playwright and actor Margaret Cameron. Her writings include three books, the most recent of which, “My Body, the Buddhist,” was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2000. Hay lives in Austin, TX, and tours extensively around the world.
Co-presented by Performa and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “Spiraling Down” was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Research Institute, and World Performance Project at Yale. Additional support was provided by the Performa Commissioning Fund.

Tickets: $25  at www.bacny.org