Dialogue: On Dance

Dialogue: Trisha Brown Douglas Dunn On Dance Trisha Brown, one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theatre, has choreographed numerous works over the last 15 years. She founded her own company in the seventies. Among her pieces are: Walking on the Wall, Planes, Sky Map, Accumulating Pieces, and Locus. She is also a founding member of the Grand Union. Douglas Dunn formerly danced with the Merce Cunningham Company and with Yvonne Rainer. A .founding member of and currently a dancer with the Grand Union, he began choreographing in 1971. Some of his pieces include: One Thing Leads to Another, Time Out, Gestures in Red, and, most recently, Lazy Madge. This dialogue was taped by the Editors ofPAJ in March, 1976. DUNN: For Lazy Madge I'm working with nine dancers, one at a time, spending about eight to ten hours making about five to ten minutes of material on each person. And I am making duets for myself with several of the people. This seems to come only after I've made solo material for the person. I'm also thinking about making trios using them without me. The dancers I'm working with are people who've studied dance-and they're dancers who're all very different, have different techniques, and strikingly different personalities which becomes very obvious when they're on the space together. I made a solo on each of two women who'd never met. They did their two solos on the space at the same time. They 76 had a strong reaction to one another and the result was very exciting on a dog-meets-dog level as well as on a dance level. I'm trying to not think about all the things I used to think about-that's been my main instruction to myself for this work. Not to pay attention to most of the formal things. So I end up paying attention to simply what I have to tell a person to do and go through movement that they can remember and keep. So far there is a very strong formality to my work and it's coming out different than if I had paid attention to it. BROWN: What do you mean by formality? DUNN: Everything. The time, the space, the rhythm, the movement . . . plus any general shape of the piece. I never lay out floor patterns . I try not to have any ideas before I start working with a person. I focus on that person and not just physically; I try to generate imagery off paying attention to them. Lazy Made BROWN: So you make a solo on them. DUNN: Very specifically. I don't work at all until the people come in. There is also some amount of material which I consider stylistic because it repeats. I just found myself using certain movements more than others. BROWN: How do you do that? DUNN: For example, the first person I worked with, Ellen Webb, is a short, squarish woman and for some reason when I thought of her certain images came to mind. The second position, for one. I'm allowing imagery to come back into my work. The other formal thing that's going on in the work is that there are very, very short phrases which are almost always stopped. Each phrase is a little rhythmic invention which eventually stops. Then something else begins. 77 BROWN: Is that because you were making the piece in that size segment and stopping and teaching it to them? DUNN: Not really. It's about having to undercut all the representational imagery that's coming in. Physical imagery-dance movement imagery as well as mime imagery. At this point I don't think of myself as someone with a personal dance style. That's irrelevant to me. What I'm dealing with is what I know about the outside world. So this piece is about that ... I'm still relatively dedicated to being functional about getting in and out of things unless there's a specific imagistic reason not to do so. The things that I do which are specifically awkward are made to be awkward. I don't...