Deborah Hay’s O, O Danielle Goldman Stepping Aside, with Eyes Askance In January 2006, the choreographer Deborah Hay presented a new piece titled O, O at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. Based on her recent solo, Room (2005), the ensemble version brought together five phenomenal performers: Jeanine Durning, Neil Greenberg, Miguel Gutierrez, Juliette Mapp, and Vicky Shick. These performers would be well known to anyone who follows contemporary dance in New York. But their presence in O, O contained seldom seen fervency and concentration, uniting the dancers as an ensemble despite their age differences and varied performance histories. This was surely a result of Hay’s performance practice. Performed in the round, the 55-minute piece engages the cast in a score of several koanlike questions, designed to challenge the dancers’ perceptual awareness. Danielle Goldman is Assistant Professor of Dance at the New School in New York City. She earned her PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU, and she received the 2005 Gertrude Lippincott Award and the 2006 Deena Burton Memorial Award for Outstanding Dissertation Research. She is currently writing a book on improvisation. Having performed for six years with Troika Ranch, she is now dancing in the works of Anna Sperber and DD Dorvillier. TDR: The Drama Review 51:2 (T194) Summer 2007. ©2007 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 157 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.157 by guest on 23 September 2021 The New York version of O, O concludes with rare poignancy, intensified by the dancers’ vocalizations.1 After 50 minutes of scored ensemble work, danced attentively with large pock- ets of silence, the lights briefly dim. When they rise, they reveal the five dancers in a cluster, grasping each other while facing outward. The silence is palpable. Then, poised like a mast- head facing a storm, Gutierrez begins to sing, unleashing a soulful lament whose deep tones reverberate through St. Mark’s Church (fig. 1). As Gutierrez repeats his wailing melody, the other dancers mouth the tune in sympathy. With protruding veins and sweating brows, it’s as if they sing the wordless dirge together. As the lament fades, the dancers loosen their grip on one another to stand momentarily side by side. After this brief period of calm, the pitch of the dance shifts dramatically. First, Gutierrez breaks from the group in a short but explosive series of flailing turns and stumbles, while the others slowly step away from each other. Then, Mapp voices her own urgent lament while carving a circular pathway through the space. Gesticulating wildly and repeatedly pitching her torso forward, she unfurls high-pitched screams and ululations. Hers are the wartime sounds of too much grief: the bone-raking sounds of mothers losing their children. Meanwhile, the others continue their hesitant steps. During this time, almost without notice and entirely without ceremony, Durning takes a black scarf (which had been wrapped around her neck) and places it over her head. Mapp concludes her lament and stands still with the others. Then, in stark silence, the others slowly step aside from the veiled figure, with their gazes turned outward as the lights gradually fade. 1. In February 2006, Hay traveled to France to produce a similar project, which premiered in Lyon in June and was shown again at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in late October. If all goes well, Hay eventually will present the New York and Lyon versions as two halves of a single program. Figure 1. (previous page) (From left) Vicky Shick, Neil Greenberg, Jeanine Durning, Juliette Mapp, and Miguel Gutierrez in Deborah Hay’s O, O, St. Mark’s Church, New York City, January 2006. The dancers cluster together as Gutierrez sings his lament. (from the video by Peter Richards) New York City, 25 September 2006 DANIELLE GOLDMAN: I was watching the DVD of O, O [2006] this morning. The ending is incred- ibly poignant. DEBORAH HAY: What do you mean by “the end”? GOLDMAN: Well, that’s hard to say. But I was thinking of the point where the dancers are in a cluster and Miguel [Gutierrez] begins to wail. From there, up until the group slowly steps away from Jeanine [Durning]. This is exquisite, and I’m won- dering if you could describe the score and explain how you arrived at this section of the dance. HAY: It’s interesting that you should start with that. Do you know Laurent Pichaud? He performed here last year and he’s in the French O, O. He’s now practicing the solo adaptation of O, O [Room], and he writes me frequently about what he’s going through. We were talking about the dramaturgy for Room, whatever that word [dramaturgy] means. Someone told me the dra- Deborah Hay, Shtudio Show, New York maturge is the person who keeps the writer, or City, 21 January 2006. (Photo by Alex the director, on course and in the moment. When Escalante) Danielle Goldman 158 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.157 by guest on 23 September 2021 What’s at stake in collectively stepping away, eyes askance, from a veiled woman who stands both silent and still? And what do the dancers’ vocal laments have to do with this cho- reographic denouement? Although Hay resists talking about her work in political terms, the final minutes of choreography jut into worldly political contexts, namely the U.S. “War on Terror.” This context was apparent before the piece even began. Upon entering St. Mark’s Church, audience members found a visor on each seat, emblazoned with the letters “O, O” as well as imagery of the Twin Towers and the fateful numbers “9/11.” Given these visors, it’s hard to see the veiled woman at the end of O, O without at least considering the conflicts of our historical moment.2 The day I began to write this essay, the New York Times reported that veiled Muslim women in London protested the leader of the House of Commons, Jack Straw, who said that full-face veils (niqabs) hinder communication. The accompanying photograph shows a veiled protestor peering out through a series of frames: her brown eyes gaze outward, first through thickly applied black eyeliner, then through her veil’s narrow slits (Cowell 2006:A3). This photograph animates my reading of O, O’s final steps, documenting a particular historical 2. Having attended a postperformance discussion of O, O, Joanna Brotman discusses the visors in her article in PAJ (2006). In particular, she notes how Hay found the visors, as well as Hay’s reaction to the suggestion of political content in O, O: When we first entered the St. Mark’s performance space, a greeter informed us that the visors on each chair were to be worn to protect our eyes from the in-the-round lighting. Sitting down, I notice the visor was decorated with an image of the Twin Towers and the words 9/11 in fake embroidery, with “O, O” drawn on in pen by hand. After the performance, I wonder about the intentionality of the visor and the political content of O, O. In the postperformance discussion with Hay, the question of politi- cal content was the last to be broached by the audience. “Dance is my form of political activity,” Hay had responded. “That I dance is political.” She confessed to feeling “inarticulate at expressing rage.” [...] She explained that when she had needed visors to protect the audience’s eyes from the lights, she scoured Chinatown for the largest bulk for the least money, and the Twin Tower visors were it. And so, the visors became a prop, a found object scouted on location [...]. (2006:70–71) I first taught Room to the French cast—that was in February [2006], after I’d done O, O here—I went to Angiers and started to teach the solo. [Unlike the New York cast, which started working as a group right away, members of the French cast began by learning the solo version from Hay on one of her initial visits to France. They were supposed to practice on their own while Hay was in the States.] Originally, the solo went from com- plete conformity to complete anarchy. That’s the way I worked on it, and it was the way I taught it. Then, when I came to New York and started working on O, O, I just didn’t feel like anarchy worked with what the dancers were doing. I couldn’t articulate what it was I wanted from them. Also, part of that end of the piece is a lament—a spontaneous lament. Somehow I wanted a spontaneous lament. GOLDMAN: “Lament” seems like the perfect word. HAY: In working with the spontaneous lament, the sounds that were coming out of Miguel and Juliette [Mapp], who had never even sung before, were just extraordinary. So I had to work with that. I also was thinking a lot about execution—people being executed without trial—and that’s where the black veil came from. Rather than an explosive ending—anarchy—I needed something quiet. I also realized that this was the end of the dance. Somehow the poetics of this were very exciting to me. It wasn’t intentional. Deborah Hay GOLDMAN: In this political climate, it’s hard not to be affected by an image of people walking away from a silent, veiled woman.