-
-
Did you know that when you create a Reading List, it can be marked public or private?
-
Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance
- Author(s): Deborah Hay
- Contributor(s): Phyllis Liedeker
- Pages: 136
- Illustrations: 40 b&w photographs, 95 diagrams
-
- Buy the ebook:
- Apple iBooks
-
- Phyllis Liedeker
-
"This is a remarkable and wonderful text whose publication will benefit the dance community enormously. It contributes crucial new dimensions to the process of documenting both dancing and dance-making. It breaks new ground as writing about the choreographic process, and at the same time, it reflects beautifully on the work of an exceptional artist."—Susan L. Foster, author of Reading Dancing
"This book counters the monolithic notions of who the ‘postmodern’ dancers are. As Lamb at the Altar identifies the contemporary work of an artist usually associated with the Judson Dance Theater of the 60s it reveals someone who has evolved, gained a new but no less creative maturity, and who now sees her work very differently than in those old days of protest and rebellion. The intertextual format is engaging, multifaceted, and modern, probably like the dance itself."—Marcia B. Siegel, author of Tail of the Dragon: New Dance, 1976–1982
Permission to Photocopy (coursepacks)
If you are requesting permission to photocopy material for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com;
If the Copyright Clearance Center cannot grant permission, you may request permission from our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
Permission to Reprint
If you are requesting permission to reprint DUP material (journal or book selection) in another book or in any other format, contact our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
Images/Art
Many images/art used in material copyrighted by Duke University Press are controlled, not by the Press, but by the owner of the image. Please check the credit line adjacent to the illustration, as well as the front and back matter of the book for a list of credits. You must obtain permission directly from the owner of the image. Occasionally, Duke University Press controls the rights to maps or other drawings. Please direct permission requests for these images to permissions@dukeupress.edu.
For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department.Subsidiary Rights/Foreign Translations
If you're interested in a Duke University Press book for subsidiary rights/translations, please contact permissions@dukeupress.edu. Include the book title/author, rights sought, and estimated print run.
Disability Requests
Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here.
Rights & Permissions Contact Information
- Email: permissions@dukeupress.edu
- Email contact for coursepacks: asstpermissions@dukeupress.edu
- Fax: 919-688-4574
- Mail:
Duke University Press
Rights and Permissions
905 W. Main Street
Suite 18B
Durham, NC 27701
For all requests please include:- 1. Author's name. If book has an editor that is different from the article author, include editor's name also.
- 2. Title of the journal article or book chapter and title of journal or title of book
- 3. Page numbers (if excerpting, provide specifics)
- For coursepacks, please also note: The number of copies requested, the school and professor requesting
- For reprints and subsidiary rights, please also note: Your volume title, publication date, publisher, print run, page count, rights sought
-
Description
"The intention of my work is to dislodge assumptions about the fixity of the three-dimensional body."—Deborah Hay
Her movements are uncharacteristic, her words subversive, her dances unlike anything done before—and this is the story of how it all works. A founding member of the famed Judson Dance Theater and a past performer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Deborah Hay is well known for choreographing works using large groups of trained and untrained dancers whose surprising combinations test the limits of the art. Lamb at the Altar is Hay’s account of a four-month seminar on movement and performance held in Austin, Texas, in 1991. There, forty-four trained and untrained dancers became the human laboratory for Hay’s creation of the dance Lamb, lamb, lamb . . . , a work that she later distilled into an evening-length solo piece, Lamb at the Altar. In her book, in part a reflection on her life as a dancer and choreographer, Hay tells how this dance came to be. She includes a movement libretto (a prose dance score) and numerous photographs by Phyllis Liedeker documenting the dance’s four-month emergence.
In an original style that has marked her teaching and writing, Hay describes her thoughts as the dance progresses, commenting on the process and on the work itself, and ultimately creating a remarkable document on the movements—precise and mysterious, mental and physical—that go into the making of a dance. Having replaced traditional movement technique with a form she calls a performance meditation practice, Hay describes how dance is enlivened, as is each living moment, by the perception of dying and then involves a freeing of this perception from emotional, psychological, clinical, and cultural attitudes into movement. Lamb at the Altar tells the story of this process as specifically practiced in the creation of a single piece.About The Author(s)
Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Deborah Hay began her career with the Judson Dance Theater and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the 1960s. In the early 1970s she created a series of Ten Circle Dances, which were collected in the book Moving through the Universe in Bare Feet. Since 1976 she has lived in Austin, Texas, where she conducts annual large-group workshops, each lasting four months and culminating in public performances. She has performed and taught workshops in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and throughout the United States.