EN: In 2019, Deborah Hay restaged her iconic masterpiece The Match for Cullberg, her first as an associated choreographer. The work is a quartet of many layers with four solos within it, solos that are spontaneously cast each night by who from the quartet steps up to perform. Each time a different solo is highlighted. Funny and odd, The Match has been described as “a fascinating, vibrant battle of wits”. The restaged version of The Match will premiere at Tanz im August in Berlin in August, as part of the festival’s Deborah Hay Retrospective.

“My ongoing interest and excitement in working with Cullberg is its’ collective energy and openness to dancing together. Working within the company are an extraordinary number of individual dancers who exceed the threshold of bodily intelligence and movement virtuosity”, says Deborah Hay about her continuing work with the company. Taking a socio-political position in her work, Hay says: “Dance is my form of political activism”.

Deborah Hay choreographed The Match in 2004 and premiered the work at Danspace, at 51. Mark’s Church in New York City in February 2004. lt was made for a selected group of highly experienced dancer and performers: Ros Warby from Melbourne, Australia, Chrysa Parkinson and Wally Cardona, New York City, and Mark Lorimer, London.

The Match contains meditation like exercises that invisibly bind the dancers to the material by establishing a mental, emotional, and bodily rigor that is visible in the performance. The work is built on the nature of experience, attention and perception.

As one major New York critic wrote: “There is no musical accompaniment, so the focus is on the dancers: their mystifying travels and relationships, both spatial and personal, and the satisfying way Ms. Hay distributes them about the space … in the strange and surprisingly handsome world of The Match.” The New York Times, Jennifer Dunning

Deborah Hay summed up The Match in a question: “What if the potential to perceive time and space as unique and original, is not a theme, or movement style, or goal, but a frame for the performers to engage their bodily intelligence through a choreography of material that challenges definition?”

The jury report from the BESSIE, aka the New York Dance and Performance Award, that was given to Deborah Hay in 2004 for The Match describes the piece as “a wondrously strange and impermanent meditation on disintegration, exploring realms from the ordinary to the preposterous by an interchanging cast of four characters.”

SE: Föreställningen är gjord för en dansarkvartett av många lager som innefattar fyra solon, de utspelas spontant i olika ordning beroende på vilka av dansarna som stiger upp för att delta. Varje föreställning sätts ljuset på ett solo. Uppträdandet gjordes för en speciell grupp av högkvalificerade dansare: Ros Warby från Melbourne, Australien, Chrysa Parkinson och Wally Cardona från New York City, och Mark Lorimer från London.

Matchen innefattar meditationsliknande övningar som osynligt binder dansarna till materialet genom att etablera en mental, emotionell och kroppslig stränghet som är visuellt tillgänglig i föreställningen som är byggd på erfarenhetens, uppmärksamhetens och perceptionens natur.