ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates processes of interweaving put into practice within the context of Deborah Hay’s Solo Performance Commissioning Project (SPCP). Each summer for fourteen years Hay convened groups of dancers from over twenty countries to learn a dance she created and also her approach to how to perform that dance. Dancers who practice her approach to performing the dance for six continuous months after they leave the workshop are entitled to perform the dance publicly, crediting Hay and also everyone in the project from that year as well as their funding sources. Based on the film by Becky Edmunds that documents the 2012 workshop along with interviews with Hay and former participants, this chapter will examine how Hay’s process, through multiple forms of interweaving, constructs a politics in dance-making that addresses issues of cultural difference and proposes a form of resistance to neoliberal demands of flexibility.
