Deborah Screenshot

On Tuesday 8 October at 18.00, Cullberg's Artistic Director Gabriel Smeets will introduce the performances with the new film Deborah Hay Alignment is Everywhere by David Young (20 min.) in the Dansens Hus foyer.
Something you don't want to miss!

The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom was created in 1989 when Deborah Hay herself danced the piece. "Deborah Hay makes simplicity expressive in her three-part solo," wrote The New York Times.
The new production for Cullberg dancer Eva Mohn is a co-production between Cullberg, Tanz im August / HAU Hebbel am Ufer and DHDC Deborah Hay Dance Company.

The original version of The Match premiered in 2004 at St Mark's Church in New York. Two years earlier, Deborah Hay had given up dance and choreography. She was exhausted by the constant struggle to get her dance works produced and presented and to survive as an artist at all.
Despite her success and reputation, the struggle never got easier, as it is for so many freelance artists.

But dance did not give up on Deborah. The idea of a new work did not leave her alone. "What if a set of tasks is given to a group of dancers, but each dancer is free to explore the tasks in the most individual and unique way possible, not only in relation to movement and space, but also in relation to each person's individual perception of time? And what if the individual is explored by having each dancer do a solo, but the solos change between dancers in each performance?" [Robert Faires in The Austin Chronicle 14 January 2005].

The work was The Match. It was praised in The Village Voice and The New York Times after its premiere and seven months later Deborah Hay received a Bessie, The New York Dance and Performance Awards, for "a strange, peculiar and unrelenting meditation on decay that explores worlds from the ordinary to the absurd with four alternating characters." [The Bessie Jury, 2004]

In the run-up to the RE-perspective Deborah Hay: Works from 1968 to the Present at the Tanz im August festival in Berlin this summer, Hay came up with the idea of staging a The Match with Cullberg's dancers.

- "It is both interesting and exciting for me to work with Cullberg's dancers, not least because of their collective energy and openness to dancing together. The company has a remarkable number of dancers who are at a very high level of physical intelligence and movement capacity," says Deborah Hay.