Short-sighted is a new dance work by pioneering choreographer Deborah Hay and performed by three of Hay’s long-standing dancers: Jeanine Durning, Scott Heron, and Ros Warby. Each performer offers a unique and deep understanding of Hay’s work across four decades. Hay’s singular, revolutionary approach to choreography and the practice of performance, centering on undoing the body’s reliance on learned behavior, has been influential to the field of dance, nationally and internationally.

Short-sighted is a trio that plays with the unexpected and absurd — with humor and precision. In performance, each dancer is responding to a written score based on Hay’s long history with language that enlarges the field of perception and movement possibility.

About the Artists:
Choreographer/performer Deborah Hay began her career in the early 1960s with the Judson Dance Theater. In her five decades at the vanguard of choreographic experimentation, she has helped re-define the field of dance with her revolutionary work and influential books: Lamb at the Altar, 1991 (Duke University Press) and My Body, the Buddhist, 2001, and Using the Sky, 2019 (Wesleyan University Press). She is one of the 21 American performing artists to receive the inaugural and groundbreaking 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award. On May 5, 2015, France’s Minister of Culture and Communication awarded Hay the title of CHEVALIER DE L’ORDRE DES ARTS ET DES LETTRES. Tanz im August 2019 presented RE-Perspective covering Hay’s work from 1968 to the present, and in 2021/22 Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona presented a retrospective of her work. For more information, visit her website.

Jeanine Durning is an Alpert Award winning choreographer, performer, teacher, and facilitator whose work spans the disciplines of dance, performance, and practice-based research. Based in New York, she is internationally recognized for her rigorous and destabilizing work, most notably her performance inging, an ongoing choreographic experiment in non-stopping speech that examines the limits and openings of language, perception, and presence. Durning’s choreographies, described by The New Yorker as having “the potential for philosophical revelation and theatrical disaster,” have been presented throughout the U.S., Europe, and Canada. Durning has had the privilege to collaborate with many choreographers, including, in her early years, David Dorfman Dance (1993–2003) and with Deborah Hay since 2005. From 2020 to 2023, she worked as Rehearsal Director for Stockholm-based dance company Cullberg, transmitting, directing, and internationally touring Hay’s choreographic works. Durning is often invited to create works for companies and independent artists, including most recently with Toronto Dance Theatre, Candoco Dance Company in London, and Norrdans in Sweden.

Scott Heron began studying with Deborah Hay in 1983 and in the years since has taught her work performed with the Deborah Hay Dance Company, and adapted her choreography in many contexts. His Bessie Award-winning solo and group dance work has been produced all over New York City. He has had long collaborations with HIJACK dance in Minneapolis, Thomas Hauert/Zoo in Belgium, and Cathy Weis Projects. He is a juggler, stilt-walker, clown, slack rope-walker and founding member of Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok. He lives in New Orleans.

Ros Warby is an award-winning Australian / American dancer and choreographer. Internationally recognized for her unique performance work, both from her own critically acclaimed creations, and her work as a dancer in the companies of Lucy Guerin Inc. & the Deborah Hay Dance Company with whom Warby began her long and fruitful collaboration in 1998. She has presented her solo work at the Venice Biennale (Italy), Dance Umbrella, Royal Opera House & Southbank Centre (London); Sydney Opera House (Sydney), Tanz im August, (Berlin); Nottdance Festival (UK), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (US), and DTW & Danspace Project (NY / US), among others. She is the recipient of the Robert Helpmann Award, Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award, and an Australia Council Fellowship. Warby has served as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and a visiting faculty member at Bennington College for the 2024–2025 academic year.

Prices include all fees, which are waived for MASS MoCA members.

This program is supported in part by the Irene Hunter Fund for Dance at MASS MoCA in association with Jacob’s Pillow.