Watching Douglas Dunn and Deborah Riley rehearsing Foot Rules, Dunn’s new duet in three acts, I’m constantly unprepared for the new possibilities they keep opening up and revealing – about the ways two dancers can utilize a space, about sustaining a focus through pauses and changes of pace.  Mostly, I’m swept up in the combination of precision and daring, the crisp control they maintain as they energetically abandon themselves to the spacious, shifting movement phrases.  Dunn, dancing with intense concentration, and Riley, who’s just as highly charged, compliment each other wonderfully – each has a long, lean body and a smooth, unforced way of attacking movement.  The dimensions of the slightly undersized rehearsal space seem to expand and contract as their dancing unfurls.

Foot Rules (at American Theater Laboratory Sept. 20-23 and 27-30), was performed in Berlin last May but it is new to New York.  Each of its three acts is a distinct entity, with its own Mimi Gross Grooms designed costumes.

In a recent interview, Dunn spoke about the origins of the new work and offered some insight into his approach to dance in general and choreography in particular.  Although he sometimes takes on a distant, perturbed look while dancing, in conversation Dunn proved to be relaxed, open and thoughtful.

Foot Rules grew out of a duet Dunn created for the Dance Theatre.  When he decided to make an extended duet work for Berlin, the Portland material became part of the first section.  The other two were created on Riley and himself.

The electronic sound score by John Driscoll which accompanies the work will be heard live at the New York performance. “The music occurs at the same time but it separate,” Dunn explained. : We don’t look to the music for guidance. When John performs it live he can watch the dance and play off it if he wishes.”

Dunn started creating his own work in 1971, when he was a member of Merce Cunningham’s company and also a part of Grand Union, a group which consisted of some of the most innovative dance talents of the 70’s and specialized in improvisational performance events.

He took the plunge from dancing to choreographing naturally. “One of the things that kept me from being afraid of it was that I had never studied choreography or known anything about it in any academic sense. I never looked at choreography, really, I looked at dancing. What interested me was the dancers doing something. I don’t know why I started to make work…yes I do. It was another way to dance, and I did have things on my mind that wanted to be done. It wasn’t a matter of, ‘it’s time, I’ve studied it, now I’m ready.’ It was ‘there’s something to be realized, so I’d better get down to it.”

“My first work wasn’t very dancey,” Dunn recalled. “I didn’t know where it came from. It was very static, and that lasted for a few years.” His “static” phrase included Performance Exhibition 101, in which he lay motionless in his loft for several hours each day while viewers came to explore and observe the loft.  His early work also included collaborations with Sara Rudner, David Gordon, Pat Catterson and David Woodberry.

Dunn has had a regular company since 1977, although he had used specific dancers in a continuous situation for an ongoing choreographic project called Lazy Madge, which began in 1976.  While the choreography he produces is very much his own and no longer a collaborative process, he stresses the roles the dancer play in the creation of a work. “They are a very powerful influence on the situation; it’s hard to describe that. I don’t often make material without knowing who is going to dance it. Dancers are half of what’s there, choreographically. There’s no such thing as a choreographer without dancers. Usually, as you see a dance get away from it’s originally people, you see a change which is like a distancing of the piece from the people; there’s a strange gap.”

Asked whether there was a specific idea behind the creation of Foot Rules, Dunn launched into explanation. “The ‘idea’ was that I wanted to have an evening-length duet. I don’t tend to work from an idea I then illustrate. I make some steps and they begin to develop themselves. Later, I look at the work and sometimes can talk more about ideas and concepts.”
Some of Dunn’s works have a strong structural basis.  Coquina, presented in New York last winter, had an intricate underlying structure. “Coquina was very complicated, in a paper sense,” Dunn said. “I did a lot of structural work aside from making steps. Basically what I did was to make a score that told me how to proceed with to make the steps.”

The third section of Foot Rules has some of the same complexity. The arrangement of Riley’s solo material was constructed out of shorter phrases which were rearranged by a random drawing to determine the number, order, direction of the phrases, and the amount of repetition to be included.

Despite his interest in certain complex compositional processes, Dunn is adamant in his view of the role that structure plays in a work. “There is no necessary connection for me between the way I make something and what it is when it’s finished. To me, it’s not a lack in the piece that someone doesn’t see how I made it. How it’s made is separate. Some people want to show you the structure in a dance; I’m trying to show the dance.

“If you’ve ever done brickwork, you know something about how the wall got there. But in order to look at it and see it, you don’t have to know how to put bricks together. It’s more about use. I don’t have to know how a refrigerator was made, I have to know how to use it. That’s what an audience is to me; they have to figure out if things are useful to them. If they can’t find a way for themselves to relate to what it is, then they are stuck, unless the dance itself tells them what they ought to use it for.

“Much performance does that – most things we see on television, on Broadway, in the movies tell you what they are and what to think about them. So you’re stuck with either getting it or not. My work is not like that. My work is there, and you can come to it or not, but there’s not something to ‘get’ or not. It’s not that somebody doesn’t understand how it got made or the way I think about it, they don’t ‘have’ it – that’s not the way it is. What they think about is what they have; they can’t be wrong.”

Other Stages                                                                                 September 20, 1979