What Pina Bausch was to the German dance scene, Deborah Hay is for the American one. Both are counted among the most influential representatives of postmodern dance. As a founding member of the New York-based Judson Dance Theater, a collective of dancers, composers, and visual artists, her approach was to use amateur dancers to create a formal vocabulary of everyday movements, generating new patterns of perception for audience and performer alike. Her choreographic praxis, along with the constant stream of publications about her methods form one of the pillars of the understanding of contemporary dance.

The choreographer and renowned dance historian Susan Leigh Foster selected previously unpublished materials from the Deborah Hay Archive, such as dance instructions, drawings, photographs, and correspondence; complemented by Hay’s own commentary as well as scientific classifications, this book is a multifaceted overview of her dance oeuvre from the 1960s to the present day.