Turn Your F^*king Head: Deborah Hay's Solo Performance Commissioning Project

In August 2012, twenty dance artists from eleven countries spent ten days at the Findhorn Community Foundation, Scotland, to learn and be coached in the performance of a solo they had each commissioned from renowned choreographer Deborah Hay. Hay's innovative Solo Performance Commissioning Project (SPCP) instils a transformative and rigorous daily practice that serves to stimulate and enrich each individual's approach to performance and choreography. This process then engenders twenty unique solo adaptations of the work through a period of practice that extends into the months following the project. To mark the moment of the final SPCP in 2012, Independent Dance commissioned videographer Becky Edmunds to document the journey of the group as they learned the solo 'Dynamic'. The resulting film, Turn Your F^*king Head, is the only time this project has been filmed. Capturing the process by which Hay transmits the same solo dance to twenty individuals, the film unveils the experiences, insights, and questions that inform the work and artistic practice. Edmunds reveals the discernment, humour, inquiry, and humility of one of the most respected and original dance artists of our time.'Turn Your F^*king Head offers an in-depth chronicle of choreographer Deborah Hay's Solo Performance Commissioning Project that will provoke rich thought and discussion among dancers and choreographers alike. Students in dance technique, choreography, history and theory, and dance criticism courses will grow from discussing and writing about TYFH, and new movement-based performance projects are bound to be engendered by ideas gleaned from the film.' Larry Lavender, Professor of Dance, University of North Carolina