Growing up in the hills west of Palo Alto, California without nearby playmates, I went out to meet the animals, earth, grass and trees. In school I tried many sports, liking those that required quick shifts, dodges and deception. At Princeton University I discovered Europe, ideas, and art, but the long hours of sedentary study made me restless. By chance I took a class at the local Ballet Society. I became a regular, and being the only male was soon asked to perform. Headed, I thought, for an academic life, I married and taught in a prep school in Connecticut. More interested, however, in subject matter than in outwitting the students' tests of authority, I became disillusioned with institutional education and moved to New York City at loose ends. To pass the time I took classes at various studios and immediately responded to Merce Cunningham's big, extended, passionately plain moving and no talking. I was studying only for pleasure, so was surprised when he invited me into his company. During the next several years I alternated dancing his rigorous, set steps, with participation in Grand Union, a leaderless group that specialized in unpremeditated performance.

In 1971, I began setting work on my own and was surprised to discover stillness taking a leading role. I didn't have to calculate or contrive, only to find the courage to bring to life pictures that were moving through me. Years later I came to understand these first pieces as studies of performance. They were trying to answer the question: What other than moving am I doing on stage? I had had the impulse to dance in front of others, and was happy when someone I took as authoritative led me there. To present myself as myself, however, or as a character I myself had chosen, was another matter: I had to discover the substance of my own need to stand up in front of people gathered to watch. Less movement gave me mental space to become familiar with my urges to move and to enact beings I hadn't known were in me, including The Man Who Fears Showing Himself to Audience.

Everything that enters through the five senses, and whatever stirs in my sixth, are influences that become part of the work in ways I don't analyze. All the same, I am aware of noticing some things more than others: the gaits of individuals and animals; architecture's effect on ambience; the individuality of trees. Rhythm and texture are everywhere: grass blowing in the wind, a rock bouncing down a mountainside, a coil of cable on the floor backstage. As for dancers to whom I've paid special attention, Merce Cunningham, Kenneth King, Steve Paxton, Jean Guizerix, Edward Villella, Rudolf Nureyev, James Truitt, Barbara Roan and Sally Silvers come to mind. The people who dance in my company, though I don't ask them to invent movement, bring out choreographic potentials I might not otherwise discover. Likewise, the artists and composers with whom I collaborate make the fish of my inner lake jump.

My goal in making dances is not to define an arena of taste, a style. Rather, it is to go from one constellation of intuitively understood embodiment to another; to step from one cluster, one unification of moves circumscribed by time and extent of consciousness, to another, under another sun. This progression is not a matter of progress; craft accrued from the experience of setting steps guarantees nothing, not even an easier start the next time. But the process of organizing it, deciding it's finished, performing it, then letting the dance recede into the past, my past, stimulates psychic turnover, the way close attention to the familiar alters perceptual habit, the way travelling to the relative exoticism of another culture refreshes and reformulates vision. Vision is what I'm after. Our lit up days…from what position can we best appreciate the continuous miracle of their appearances…or are they another form of night, the darkness we know that hides things from us? For me, the probing of perception and consciousness has had to include the full participation of an activated body. Placement of this figure, moving or still, in space, has been of greater concern than its potential psychological meaning, so wonderfully elaborated in literature. As if lovingly made decisions about the shape, rhythm and tempo of trained bodies, call it concentrated, textural consideration of their heightened potential for organized elaboration, urged on and influenced no matter how much by my un-chosen, unrealizable desire to confront and to harmonize endlessly form-changing inner and outer demons, might stimulate aesthetic feeling in one who sees the result.

During the setting of a step, a way to diminish the importance of what I like, and what others might like or dislike, is to conjure a procedure that forces an unforeseen result: I can't get away from myself, but I can try to dodge or outrun my vision-narrowing preferences. Sometimes a completed step or dance suggests, by associative similarity or difference, or by non-associative triggering, the direction of a next step or dance: seeing a lake, one thinks of an ocean, then a mud flat, then a desert, then a spindle. If I recognize a step's meaning and find it too frightening, I can always discard the move, or change it. Or stay with it to get past the fright. My project is to allow the reality I'm a part of to take me over completely, so that I'm inseparable from, thereby expressive of, the impersonal aspect of "my" nature. Then to consider whether what's revealed is worth showing to others.

Douglas Dunn
Pisa, July 2002