We could ask whose work today shares this communicative power: Butoh artists certainly, Kazua Ohno and Eiko and Koma come to mind. Among those connected to the postmodern lineage I think of Deborah Hay who cultivates in her dancers a physical immediacy and sense of choicelessness about their actions, along with a very human vulnerability that have, for me, the most direct contemporary correspondence to Isadora.

I encountered Hay’s methods at the European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Most of her emphasis was on the how of performing. She generated materials with a minimum of fuss, swiftly creating both the score for the overall performance (not unlike a roadmap of events and cues) and the choreography (the actual steps and movement phrases). The focus was on realizing the potential of both score and choreography through the doing of it, allowing it to transform in the process. Quality of attention was paramount and, in fact, much more significant than the ‘what’ of performing.

Hay’s method challenges the performer to contemplate a riddle-like phrase while performing. I like using the word “koan” to describe these riddles, “koan” being a paradoxical statement that a Zen teacher assigns a student to contemplate. Because it is impossible to penetrate the meaning of koans with conventional thinking, contemplating them is considered a tool on the path to attaining enlightenment. Hay would provide the dancers with context for each koan, explaining its broader intent.

The koan “invite being seen” places the performer in an open relationship to the audience, with 360-degree awareness rather than privileging one “front.” Envisioning oneself as “53 trillion cells alive and changing” dislodges the ego’s customary self-consciousness in performing, perhaps in a similar way to Isadora’s imagining of herself as not one soloist, but as one of a vast chorus.

The koan “Aha nada” highlights the simultaneous ordinariness and exceptional qualities of just about anything we might find or perceive. “Aha” denotes surprise and excitement, and an invitation to regard whatever one has – sensations, visual experiences, fellow dancers – as unique and important. “Nada,” or “nothing” in Spanish, is the counterweight, re-asserting ordinariness. Watching a dancer work with this koan, we can see their simultaneous appreciation of and matter-of-fact relationships with the most elementary actions and perceptions. I think here of Isadora’s attraction to Greek sculptures depicting “ordinary” movement like the lacing of a sandal.

Another koan called “Tower of Babel” was, especially in a group format, about attempting to find a way to communicate with other performers while “speaking one’s own language.” Isadora’s own dance language, so radical for her era, was nonetheless based in an acute observation of everyday actions which, she believed, would be understood far better than the rarefied and constricted forms she rebelled against.

Like Isadora, Hay made discoveries about performing powerfully through her own practice that she has endeavored to transmit to younger dancers. Two recent works, performed at Danspace in New York and on tour by ensembles of highly regarded younger professionals show how Hay’s practices develop an alternate kind of virtuosity. Through her guidance and the practice of the (present-day equivalents of the kinds of) koans described above, Hay helps her performers deepen and solidify their ability to share with us their own sense of surprise at the unfolding of each vivid moment.

Whereas the young dancers of Her Topia held their faces mask-like in a default postmodern blankness, Hay’s dancers reminded me of deMille’s description of Duncan’s own face: an ordinary face, waiting, and anticipating the arrival of fate.