Hay Stops Playing Awake

Choreographer Deborah Hay is calling a halt to one of her signature contributions to Austin cultural life and to dance in general. She is ending the Playing Awake large group workshops which she has conducted every spring for the past 15 years. In the Playing Awake format, Hay worked with trained and untrained dancers for four consecutive months, during which time they would create a new movement piece. She documented the process in her book Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance, which covers Playing Awake 1991. The workshops have served their purpose as a form for her artistic growth, Hay says in the most recent Deborah Hay Dance Company newsletter. Now, she writes, "I want to scrutinize choreography. I want more time alone in a studio and/or a more sophisticated group of students and peers. In what ways this group may be more sophisticated is something I hope to learn over the next year." Hay will spend a significant amount of that time abroad. Beginning August 28, she will spend four-and-a-half weeks performing and conducting workshops in New Zealand and Australia. Then, for the month of October, she and Austin artist Tré Arenz will be artists-in-residence at the prestigious Bellagio Study and Conference Center on Lake Como in Italy. Finally, from November 24 through Decem-ber 20, Hay will be in residency at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam.

Aloha, Johnson/Long

Hay isn't the only local dancer to be doing some serious traveling this summer. Darla Johnson, Andrew Long, and members of their company (in this case, dancers Kate Warren, Heather Sultz, and Lilla Geisler, actor Tim Mateer, and Technical Director Laura Sandberg) have just returned from a week-long residency at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. While there, the Austin artists conducted master classes and workshops, and performed Walking on Water, the concluding chapter in their recent trilogy of full-length works. Call 467-0704 for info.

A Grant for Grenon

Austin photographer Martha Grenon has been awarded a grant from ArtsLink to develop a cross-disciplinary project with Albanian writer Robert Martikos. The collaboration will be a photo-documentary essay on the life of a family during and after the Hoxha regime, the most severe of the Eastern European communist dictatorships. Grenon's images will be matched to writings that Martikos has been compiling mostly in secret over the past 15 years. The project will result in an exhibition to be shown in both the United States and Albania and will see print as a handmade, limited-edition book. ArtsLink enables artists and arts organizations in the U.S. to develop projects with their counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe on projects which may benefit both countries. Call 474-9047 or 442-9709 for info.

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