This week the answer is Scotland – on the isle of Findhorn, to be precise – but if you’d asked two weeks ago, the answer would’ve been Finland, and if you ask next week, the answer will be Portland (Oregon, that is). The Austin choreographer, truly a global citizen, is in the midst of a major travel binge. For the month of August, Hay was in residence at Helsinki’s Zodiak – Center for New Dance to teach a new sextet, “The North Door,” to six European dancers whom she handpicked from 80 people who auditioned for her in Finland last November. In Findhorn, she’s spending 11 days conducting the first European edition of her ongoing solo performance commissioning project. In Portland, she’ll join Diamanda Galas, Heather Woodbury, 33 Fainting Spells, and more than a dozen other artists for the Time-Based Arts Festival organized by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Hay will perform “The Ridge,” a solo adaptation of “The Match,” the dance she created during a residency in New York this past spring and choreographed as a quartet, on a program with two other adaptations of “The Match.” Later in the fall, she flies up to Seattle, where she’ll perform both “The Ridge” and “A Performative Lecture on ‘Beauty,'” in which she takes a dance she created a few years ago and reinvents it as a lecture, then spend a week teaching. Then it’s down – way down – to Curitiba in southern Brazil for a two-week residency. Expect her home no later than January; that’s when she’s presenting a performance of “The Match” here.
This article appears in September 10 • 2004.