Make Hay While the Sun Shines

Make Hay While the Sun Shines is a series of dances that map personal stories and dancing moments. The performance starts from the details that exist before any whole can be imagined, from memories of dance and from the chaos of reality. Based on a movement practice that responds to disharmony and change, a dance is created that is perhaps a little more like life itself: uneven, fascinating, stumbling, lovable and unpredictable.

Make Hay While the Sun Shines is a series of dances developed by Stina Nyberg and a shifting cohort of dancers through 2019-2023 in New York and Stockholm. It emerges from an all embracing, all accepting “yes/and”, a dance of constant change, saying yes to both the habitual and the unknown. It samples the dance history of a cross-generational cast of dancers and merges them into new forms.

The performance departs from the incoherency of movements and histories. It engages in time specific and partial views, the uncategorized details that pre-exists the whole, and the chaos called reality. Together, the dance becomes much like life itself: irregular, fascinating, unsuccessful, stumbling, loving and pretty unpredictable.

Iterations have been presented at Center for Performance Research (NYC), Performance Mix (NYC), Dans.Hall (Farsta), La Mama Studios (NYC), MDT (Stockholm) and Pageant (NYC).

In 2021, we collaborated with Stina Nyberg on this publication that accompanied the third iteration of the performance at MDT, Moderna Dance Teatern in Stockholm. This publication gathered conversations between Nyberg and the various participating dancers, conducted alongside the process of the piece, and informing the piece throughout its process. These conversations share personal experiences and critical reflections, touching upon dance education and the broader field, pedagogy, feminism, bullying, racism, training, encouragement and friendship.

Following the iterative and improvisational process of the performance, the publication’s design uses many typefaces and expressions to create a rigorous cacophony of voices that at times cohere and offer comfort and rest, while at other times dissonant and demanding. Each conversation was given a different visual and typographic approach based on the stories and experiences they shared, while providing a coherent, yet changing, structure.  In 2023 a new dance film and a second edition of the book was released.