Deborah Jowitt

At one point during a rehearsal of his “Lazy Madge,” Douglas Dunn stares at the dancers who are waiting patiently for instructions. He’s been turning out movement at a steady pace for about two hours. Now he deftly shifts the ball to them, asking for three individual activities – like tying a shoe, drinking water. But he doesn’t want these pantomimes clear: They’re to be sketched out, barely indicated, blurred around the edges. More like thinking about what you’re going to do than doing it. I’m interested in the way his instructions gently tug the dancers away from the comfort of their own easy outs. Like many choreographers of his generation, Dunn uses Merce Cunningham as a kind of reference point – accepting as a given that one dances about dancing. But one of the things that makes Dunn one of the most interesting choreographers around is that he shows – Dunn seems particularly interested in showing (on virtuoso dancers and in a noncommittal context) some of what the human body reveals when it is ill at ease, hesitant, off-guard, making choices.

This has always, I think, been a feature of his solos. (“Lazy Madge” is, in effect, his first substantial group piece.) After seeing “Gestures in Red,” I wrote that Dunn looked like a man you could trust. And then spent a lot of time wondering what I meant by that. I was pretty sure it had only a little to do with his level gaze, his casual demeanor, his lean well-made face and body (he could probably play Robert Redford better than Redford does). Now I think I was responding to the fact that his dancing seems so much a process of testing forces or monitoring space. When he launches into something risky or totally surprising, I still sense it as the product of some decision: “now, if I shifted my pelvis a little more to the left, what would I have to do if I didn’t want to fall?” Unlike some dancers, he doesn’t do all his testing in a studio, so he can ask the audience to accept only a glittering result unencumbered by effort. He doesn’t present A Balance (with appropriate fanfare), but a man in the act of balancing. So… a man you can trust. Like the butcher who grinds the hamburger where the customer can see it.

Dunn began choreographing five or six years ago – while he was still dancing in Merce Cunningham’s company. He’s done a lot of different kinds of things, been involved in some provocative collaborations (with Sara Rudner, David Gordon, David Woodberry), continued to work with the Grand Union – the improvisatory group that developed out of Yvonne Rainer’s company. He won’t allow himself to forget that the point isn’t so much to formulate answers as it is to keep asking new questions. Nor is he reluctant to push things to extremes. (At one of the last performances the Grand Union gave in this city, Dunn entered in his underwear and took a good half hour to get dressed and some more time stretching a rope across the performing area and getting people to hold it or tie it for him. Treating preparations for performance as performance material, too.)

What Dunn is doing today is adding a group section to “Lazy Madge” for the performances at 541 Broadway on June 11 to 13 and 18 to 20. “A grand finale?” I ask. He laughs a lot. And says, “Exactly.” While we sit in his pleasant, rather Spartan loft (efficient kitchen, bathroom, work table, studio, but only one easy chair plus a few foam mattresses stacked, discouragingly, against the wall), waiting to see what dancers will show up, he shows me a bunch of papers, a score of “Lazy Madge.” You mean, a record? No. Jennifer Mascall, one of the dancers in “Lazy Madge” is making a book of choreographers’ private notation systems – drawings, notes, whatever. Dunn had never thought about such things, but he got interested. He gave poet Annabel Levitt some of the little notebooks he jots things down in all the time; she ordered the material into categories (Like “death,” “choreography,” “phone numbers”), and arranged them into poems. Poems whose speculative, adventurously rambling structure is analogous to that of “Lazy Madge”: “… first I do it standing, and now I do it taking a shit, now I do it kicking horses…”) They reveal the contents of Doug’s mind, filtered through another sensibility, just as the dance reveals his material through decisions imposed by the dancers. Up to now, Dunn has choreographed material for them one at a time, inevitably zeroing in on their individual energies. He’s made a few duets or trios. He doesn’t set his own part except for moments of contact in a duet (safety first). The dancers then decide individually in performance what to do when. Every performance has been, will be, different from every other one.

Douglas Dunn didn’t begin dancing until his junior year in college. He likes this story: He was staying on the Princeton campus over a vacation to finish an overdue paper, and a friend took him to visit a professor of Chinese literature, a remarkable man – then very ill, dying, they thought – who had embarked on a project which involved studying each of the arts for two years. He said to Doug almost immediately, “Have you ever taken a ballet class?” Doug forgot the conversation, but the professor recovered, got Doug to the local ballet school, and that was that. Dunn, hooked, spent one summer at Jacob’s Pillow (“Margaret Craske, La Meri, Ted Shawn – I’d never even heard of them”), came to New York in the summer of 1968 and by fall was working with Yvonne Rainer. Some time after that, he began to dance in Merce Cunningham’s company, too.

Dunn tuned in instantly, unhesitatingly, to what Cunningham was doing with the very first class he took at the studio. A technique that had clarity and discipline, but room to move around in. Dancing from which everything deliberately allusive had been sheared. “It was freeing for me. I wasn’t worried about art. I wasn’t worried about anything anymore. I just wanted to do that dancing.” Dunn admires – as I’d have guessed – the look of Merce Cunningham dancing: the alertness, the upright posture. “It’s so… civilized,” he says – meaning Cunningham’s view of the human body. He can remember a time when he identified so closely with Cunningham himself that he said backstage to Carolyn Brown, “I’m not interested in dancing how I am now. I want to dance the way Merce is dancing now. I want to be that old in my dancing.” (And he laughs at himself: “Not to mention that skilled, or anything…”)

For a long time, Dunn was content just to work at dancing, but eventually he began to wonder about performing. He had never felt an urge to be up on a stage; he had simply wanted to dance, and here he was doing a lot of performing. What was that all about? Finding it made more sense to him to examine the fact of performance “when it didn’t have to do with just doing your steps,” he began to make dances without much dancing in them. In one of the sections he contributed to a collaborative piece with Sara Rudner in 1971, he lay spread-eagled on the floor while Rudner held three-minute poses on his back. (“Sara hated doing it.”) Another section had to do with his hanging her up on block and tackle. And more stillnesses. During the first part of his solo, “Time Out,” Dunn – for about a half hour – fitted his body into a corner of the room, checking out all his own joints and bending points, holding each pose. (He says he found himself doing this one day in Paris in a gallery event organized by Robert Wilson. Perhaps it reflected the fact that he was living in a very small hotel room and had nowhere to work.) He set up “Four for Nothing” (1974) so that four performers would have to cope with being in a space with almost nothing to do. An empty space that would, in a way, stay empty, because so much of what was going on was going on inside the performers. Then he went to another kind of extreme in “101” – filled the space of his studio with an astonishing splintery maze and lay in it for four hours almost every day over a period of weeks. On view. Exhibiting himself in the most factual and unequivocal way, and – since he had decided he would not move nor speak nor open his eyes – laying himself open to being treated as an object. Many people spoke to him, although only on the very last day did any kind of hostile teasing or touching occur. He became, in a sense, not only the “performance,” but also the audience for our thoughts and our creaking progress.

Like many choreographers today, Dunn hasn’t much interest in repertory. If you missed his joint concert with David Gordon in which the two of them batted 200 individually conceived mini-phrases (100 each) back and forth like a conversation, well, you missed it. The same with the straightforward, but wonderfully unusual lifts and carries he and David Woodberry worked out in their collaborative event. His extraordinary “Gestures in Red” is portable, though, and so – decidedly – is “Lazy Madge”. As least for as long as it continues to interest Dunn and his collaborators.

The 2 p.m. “grand finale” rehearsal is amazing to me. Now I understand, almost, something Dunn said earlier about “Lazy Madge,” about “treating the impulse to make a dance as an autonomous impulse – even separate, in a way, from some kind of plan.” He’s trying to do a minimum of preparation and to keep the dance steadily growing, flowing on. At 2, he sets Jennifer Mascall and Dana Roth, two tall women, inching along the floor on all fours. By about 2:45, he’s poured out a long contrapuntal sequence that brings them together, standing shoulder to shoulder. He stares a minute. Christina Grasso-Caprioli and Daniel Press have just come up the stairs and are fiddling with their leg warmers and doing desultory plies. Okay. Next minute he’s got Christina jumping into Jennifer and Dana’s arms. Now Dunn has a lot of options: They can set her down, they can… But here’s Daniel, and now Ellen Webb, too, waiting on the sidelines. He asks them to run in and swoop Christina away from the other two and carry her off like a battering ram. That’s the way it goes all afternoon. Jennifer has to leave the rehearsal, so she leaves the dance for the day. Ruth Alpert arrives and walks right into the choreography. When Michael Bloom comes in much later, full of beans, Dunn catapults him into the tired herd with a jump. For four and a half hours, there is only one official break and very few pauses, Dunn is very precise about what he wants (“Lay your hands along a 45-degree beveled hill” – I like that one), but not finicky about instant perfection, more attentive to force and direction than to shape. As he thinks, he ruffles his yellow hair, rubs his face pink, slides to the floor, wanders through the dancers making little feints and jabs at the air (at the dance?). Absolutely, and calmly, refusing to run dry. Or to fiddle too much with what he’s doing. His process demonstrates potently – although it doesn’t explain – that however startling his movement, however much it veers from the large to the small, the clear to the sloughed-off, the fast to the slow, the calm to the violent, it never has that self-conscious “what-if-I-scratched-my-nose-now?” look that some post-Cunningham choreographers achieve. It is dance at the moment it is being danced. A pretty sound image of life as it is being lived.