Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

Douglas Dunn Talking Dancing

In Douglas Dunn’s 101, a dance he made in 1974, he lay motionless for four hours a day, dressed in white overalls with blue and red makeup on his face, on top of a large maze he had constructed in his SoHo loft. The piece questioned a number of expectations about dance. It seemed to say, first, that dance might not only be about motion— it might consist only of stillness, the negation of motion. Expectations about the relationship between dancer or choreographer and spectator were also turned upside down. In 101 Dunn seemed to say that the choices in a dance could rest almost entirely in the audience’s hands. Dunn remained passive while the spectators chose how long to make the dance last for themselves, how close to get to Dunn, what to notice about their own movements through the maze. Yet Dunn, one of New York’s major postmodern choreographers for the last ten years, is certainly interested in motion. His Gestures in Red (1975), a long solo, was virtually the opposite of 101. Here the dance was a catalog of an astounding range of movement possibilities. It began 50 k Douglas Dunn Talking Dancing    : SoHo Weekly News, September 20, 1979 with Dunn standing, setting different parts of his body in motion one at a time; then he systematically expanded the dance to cover the whole performance space, with his entire body moving rapidly. In Nevada (1973), performed in a program at the New School where choreographers comment on their work, Dunn juxtaposed pure movement invention against pure word play, incorporating the critique section of the evening into the format of his short dance. But his next work, Time Out (1973), was a drastic contrast: a static work using various props and costumes but no words at all, to create a series of theatrical tableaux peppered with small movement episodes. The ten or so dances that Dunn has made over the past six years all share highly symmetrical structures, rigorous in their concentration on particular themes and their negations. Born in California in 1942, Dunn was a latecomer to dance. He has always been athletic, but didn’t start dancing until he was in college, at Princeton. Eventually he came to New York to study dance, and he began performing with Yvonne Rainer in 1968. The following year he joined Merce Cunningham’s company, where he remained until 1973. When Rainer’s Continuous Project—Altered Daily eventually gave rise to the improvisatory Grand Union in 1970, Dunn also danced with that group until it disbanded in 1976. Dunn has collaborated on choreography with other dancers (including Sara Rudner, David Gordon, Pat Catterson, Sheela Raj) and with filmmakers (Charles Atlas, Amy Greenfield). He has also published poetry, often under the name Fanny Logos. Many of Dunn’s works have been solo dances, but Lazy Madge (1976– 79) was a long, changing, ongoing work for a stable group of dancers who could exercise many independent choices in performance. Octopus (1974), again on a New School program, gently involved the audience by enticing them to sing and to throw balls at the dancers. With Celeste (1977), Dunn used a cast of forty. His newest work, Foot Rules, an hour-or-so duet in three acts for himself and Deborah Riley, has been gestating for a year; it was filmed for a program on German television during the summer. Foot Rules, which will open the fall season at American Theater Laboratory on Thursday night, is a dance about partnering. For the first two acts, Dunn and Douglas Dunn Talking Dancing 51 Riley both are on stage continuously, but don’t always dance together: during the final act, when Dunn sometimes leaves the dancing space, the aloneness of the solo dancer becomes striking. Throughout the piece there are fleeting images of prayer, of fights and games, of eroticism. Yet the dance never settles into a single literal meaning. Several elements give Foot Rules a quality of openness as well as density—the variety of its choreographic material; the complex ways the movements are put together and varied; the extreme contrasts between very fast and very slow movements, as well as the contrasts between pausings and movements; the length of the duet; the gradual stripping down of the costumes (designed by Mimi Gross Grooms) between acts; and the music (by John Driscoll) that is independent of the dancing. Unlike many postmodern choreographers who drastically simplify dance in order to make movements and...