The Well

Dancer and choreographer Deborah Hay (Brooklyn, New York, 1941 – Austin, Texas, present) and Robert Rauschenberg had been friends for more than two decades when he designed the poster for the Deborah Hay Dance Company’s 1983 performance of The Well at Austin’s Capitol City Playhouse. Both played pivotal roles in the vibrant artistic community centered on the Judson Memorial Church in downtown New York in the early 1960s, which redefined dance to blur the line between choreography and everyday movements. While Rauschenberg is better known as a visual artist, dance played a pivotal role in his early career: he collaborated with Merce Cunningham and members of the Judson Dance Theater, such as Hay, and choreographed thirteen works between 1963 and 1967.

Hay established the four-person Deborah Hay Dance Company in Austin in 1980. The Well was one of several works she conceived with composer Pauline Oliveros (Houston, Texas, 1932 – Kingston, New York, 2016), a pioneer of experimental and electronic music. Rauschenberg’s poster reproduces a collage of a photograph of Hay dancing, a lace-edged napkin, a scrap of gridded fabric, and feathers, with hand lettering. This combination of media and crossing of technical boundaries echoes the bridging of art and life that defined both Rauschenberg’s career and the development of postmodern dance.