tHE MAtCH

PRESS RELEASE

and

THE MATCH

The Match is a quartet, choreographed and directed by Deborah Hay. It premiered at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City in February 2004. In September 2004, Deborah Hay received a New York Bessie Award for the choreography of The Match. It was made for a select group of highly experienced dancer/performers: Ros Warby from Melbourne, Australia, Chrysa Parkinson and Wally Cardona, New York City, and Mark Lorimer, London. Noted lighting designer Jennifer Tipton created the lighting for these performances.

“…[It] is a fascinating, vibrant battle of wits that unfolds through a silent score of movement.” TimeOut New York, issue #435, 2004

The Match contains meditation-like exercises that invisibly bind the dancers to the material by establishing a mental, emotional, and bodily idiom that manifests in the performance ensemble.

“There is no musical accompaniment, so the focus is on the dancers: their mystifying travels and relationships, both spatial and personal, and the satisfying way Ms. Hay distributes them about the space. …Who knows what was going on, seemingly in real time, in the strange and surprisingly handsome little world of “The Match”? There was nowhere else to look, however, and that was good.” Jennifer Dunning, New York Times, 2/13/04

Following the Danspace performances, each dancer began a solo adaptation of the quartet. Sensations, memories, fragments, and details from The Match are embedded in the solo adaptations. A daily practice of the performance of the solo, by each dancer, was the method by which the adaptation becomes a collaboration rather than a bodily reenactment of already existing material, thus stretching the historical norms that have determined how dance is transmitted.

THE ARTISTS

Wally Cardona came to New York City to attend The Juilliard School (BFA in Dance '89). He was a member of the Ralph Lemon Company from 1987-95. In 1997, he founded the Wally Cardona Quartet and has since created seven works for the group. Upcoming projects include a new work created for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival (2005).

Mark Lorimer trained at London Contemporary Dance School and worked a few years with Lea Anderson/The Featherstonehaughs before moving to Brussels. There he spent the last 10 years working with Rosas/Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker, and ZOO/Thomas Hauert (founder member).
Chrysa Parkinson is a performer and teacher living in Brussels and New York. She is a member of Tere O'Connor Dance (since 1987). She is currently working with Zoo/Thomas Hauert(BE), and David Zambrano(NL). In 1996 she was awarded a Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award) for sustained achievement.

Ros Warby is a Melbourne based dancer and choreographer. She has performed with the Lucy Guerin Co, Deborah Hay Dance Co, and Danceworks. Warby received a Greenroom performance award in 2000, and ‘SOLOS’, received the 2002 Greenroom award for best solo performance, and nominations for best production and design. Her recent work, SWIFT, was short listed for the Australian Dance award 2003. Warby is an Australia Council Fellowship recipient for 2002-2004.

Jennifer Tipton is well known for her work in theater, dance and opera. Her recent work in opera includes Martin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra at the Seattle Opera, Janacek’s Osud at Bard’s Fisher Performing Arts Center and Don Giovanni at La Monnaie in Brussels. Her recent work in dance includes Paul Taylor's Le Grand Puppetier and Trisha Brown's Present Tense. In theater her recent work includes Hamlet at Yale, Cavedweller at the NY Theater Workshop and the new work in progress for the Wooster Group. Ms. Tipton teaches lighting at the Yale School of Drama. She is the recipient of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for 2001 and the Jerome Robbins Prize in 2003.

In 1960 Deborah Hay became part a group of experimental artists who were primarily influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, later known as the Judson Dance Theater. In 1964 she danced with the Cunningham Dance Company during a 6-month tour through Europe and Asia. By 1967 she focused on large-scale dance projects involving untrained dancers, thus distancing herself from the performing arena and opening a long period of reflection about how dance is transmitted and who dances. In 1970 she left New York and settled in a community in northern Vermont. In this period Hay began to define a rigorous method of performance practice that still continues to inform her work as a student, teacher, and dancer. In 1976 she moved to Austin, Texas. Her attention focused now on ‘playing awake’, practices that engage the whole person who is performing. Her second book, Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (Duke University Press, 1994) documents the unique creative process that defines this work. Her third book, My Body, the Buddhist, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2000. Since the mid-nineties she has focused almost exclusively on the choreography of solo dances, performing them around the world and passing them on to notable performers in the US, Europe, and Australia. Recently Mikhail Baryshnikov observed that "there are aspects of dance performance that I had always accepted as a given. Working with Deborah Hay has deepened my understanding of what we do as dancers. She has helped bring a greater vitality to the stage.”
Deborah Hay tours in the US, Europe, and Australia both as a performer and a teacher. She received a 1983 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography, numerous National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship in 1996. In 2002 she was inducted into the first Hall of Fame for the Arts, in Austin, Texas and in 2004 she received a New York Bessie Award for her choreography of The Match.