Merging a Possible with the Impossible
My practice of performance is as impossible
as wanting it to be possible.
Through movement directives, we will experiment
with tools for accessing this bodily paradox.
Deborah Hay

In the framework of point Deborah Hay – the tributary programme to the prominent choreographer – the Athens Epidaurus Festival announces an open call for participation in a dance workshop with choreographer Deborah Hay, to be held from 7 to 10 July 2026.
The workshop is open to artists from all creative fields interested in how to enhance and expand one’s resources for movement.

Workshop dates: 7-10 July 2026, 10:00 to 13:00
Venue: National Theatre of Greece, Event Hall
Participation fee: 90€

Application process: All interested candidates are invited to submit a brief biographical note (maximum 250 words) to seminars@aefestival.gr (subject line: DEBORAH HAY_name).

Application deadline: 15 June 2026

Biographic note

Deborah Hay was born in 1941 in Brooklyn and began her career in the early 1960s with the Judson Dance Theatre. For more than five decades, she has been at the vanguard of choreographic experimentation, helping to redefine the field of dance through both her trailblazing practice and influential books, including Lamb at the Altar (1991), My Body, the Buddhist (2001), and Using the Sky (2019) – the latter soon to be published in Greek. Hay’s choreographic practice centres on undoing the body’s reliance on learned behaviour by broadening the spectrum from which a dancer can elicit movement. Through years of teaching and collaboration with both professional and non-professional dancers, Hay has crafted innovative frameworks for the advancement of contemporary dance, including the Solo Performance Commissioning Project, through which more than three hundred dancers worldwide have created their own adaptations of her solo works. She is one of the twenty-one American performing artists to have received the inaugural 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award. Extensive retrospectives of her work have been presented at various festivals and museums, including Tanz Im August in Berlin, which unveiled the programme RE-Perspective in 2019, surveying Hay’s work from 1968 to the present. Her work was also featured in the 2018 MoMA exhibition Judson Dance Theatre: The Work Is Never Done.