The Department of Performing and Media Arts welcomes Miguel Angel Guzmán to perform Dynamic by Deborah Hay on Wednesday, September 23, at 7:00pm in the Dance Studio Theatre (SB10), Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.
Internationally renowned dancer and performer Miguel Angel Guzmán will perform Dynamic by iconic choreographer Deborah Hay, which was bestowed upon him when selected as one of twenty dancers from across the globe for Hay’s prestigious and final Solo Performance Commissioning Project in 2012. Dynamic is being presented in PMA 2300 Dance Composition.
Please direct any inquiries to Assistant Professor of the Practice Danielle Russo at drusso@cornell.edu.
About Miguel Angel Guzmán:
Miguel is an international dance and theatre artist currently residing in New York City. Born in Mexico, Miguel graduated from the Universidad de las Américas Puebla, with Theatre and Dance degrees.
He has been part of festivals such as ImPulsTanz (Austria), IF ONLY (Ireland), Performática (Mexico), Stoff Fringe Festival (Sweden), American Dance Festival (USA). Miguel has performed in the works of Alexandra Pirici, Ligia Lewis, Madeline Hollander, Coco Karol & Sxip Shirey, Pope.L, Robert Whitman, Shawnée Michaelain Holloway, Will Rawls, Simone Forti and Deborah Hay.
Miguel’s work takes place mainly between the United States and Europe where he was seen last in Berlin performing in Ligia Lewis’ I’m Not Here Forrrrr… at the Gropius Bau museum and in Alexandra Pirici’s Attune at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum.
About Deborah Hay’s Dynamic:
In the summer of 2012, iconic choreographer Deborah Hay gathered 20 dancers from several parts of the world (Canada, United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, Estonia, Lithuania and Turkey) to create the very last piece for the Solo Performance Commissioning Project; a residence that begun 14 years ago in Whidbey Island, Washington State and that later was moved to Findhorn, Scotland.
The Solo Performance Commissioning Project took place over the course of two weeks in which Deborah and the dancers would practice the performance of “Dynamic” (the title of this final solo) for long periods of time, in order to learn without thinking and to allow the cellular body to choreograph the dance, to choreograph the score that had been previously created by Hay. In an intense learning environment, she challenged the performers with movement concepts that triggered multiple levels of perception at once. Hay choreographs the world “between” moments, where movement proclivity plays second fiddle to exercised inquiry. Once the residence concluded, the dancers were required to have an every day practice of the solo, during the course of nine months, before they could perform it in front of a live audience. In this way, the dancers would be able to have their creative input to Deborah's score while at the same time staying close and truthful to her choreographic style and aesthetic. In the end, “Dynamic” has 20 different versions of itself, adapted and performed by each one of the dancers, and thus this evening is presented so that the audience can appreciate one of the 20 different and multiple possibilities that each solo can offer.
“Dynamic” is never the same. Not for the performers nor for the audience. Each performance, each adaptation of the solo by every single one of the performers is unique. “Dynamic” is a challenge both for performer and audience members, inviting us to change our perception by how we see as opposed to what we are looking at. The beauty and subtlety of “Dynamic” lie in it's exciting, intriguing and extremely vulnerable quest for grasping the ungraspable, for revealing what we're not revealing.
“What if anywhere I am, wherever I am, Intimacy is?”
Deborah Hay, born in Brooklyn in 1941, is regarded by critics and historians as one of the most influential representatives of postmodern dance.
She trained with Merce Cunningham and danced with the Cunningham Dance Company during the 1964 world tour. She was an original member of the Judson Dance Theater, making dances since the early 1960s, collaborating with different many artists and mainly choreographing for untrained performers. Since 2000 she has worked exclusively with experienced performers.
Hay has written 4 books: Moving Through the Universe in Bare Feet (1975), Lamb at the Altar (1994) about the creative process that led to her dance of the same name, My Body, the Buddhist (2000) reflecting on embodied knowledge, and Using the Sky, an elaboration of her process. In 2012 she was selected for the inaugural Doris Duke Artist Award. Hay received an Honorary Doctor of Dance from Helsinki Theatre Academy and in 2016 she became a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France.
