Douglas Dunn has threaded his way through New York's avant-garde dance scene for 10 years, a low-keyed presence who has managed, nonetheless, to emerge as a choreographer and performer considered one of the most dependably interesting of the post-modern dance breed. To Horst Koegler, the German dance critic, Mr. Dunn was "the one sensational discovery" of the New Dance '76 festival held in Graz, Austria. "Mostly he just dances along, but once or twice he relates to a wall, to a staircase or to a triangular board that he carries along, which adds a sculptural dimension to his dance.  Then he suddenly disappears, but is back seconds later as if nothing had happened.  His footwork and legwork is incredibly lacy, very light and brilliant and seems totally relaxed, with the two feet doing completely different things (as do his arms) and never the things which seem logical."

Mr. Koegler has compared the "lanky guy from New York" with the ice-dancer John Curry, Fred Astaire, Andy Warhol, the English artist David Hockney and Mark Twain.  And there is a hint of each in Mr. Dunn. But last week - with a mischievous glint in his eyes and a cool equanimity that suggested a touch of arrogance - he resembled no one so much as a choreographer engaged in a reflective exploration of movement as he rehearsed a new piece in his sparsely furnished loft studio-home in SoHo.

"Foot Rules," a one-hour, three-act duet performed with Deborah Riley, set to a sound score by John Driscoll and costumes by Mimi Gross Grooms, will open the Dance Theater Workshop's fall season at the American Theater Laboratory on Thursday.  It will also mark a new preoccupation for Mr. Dunn: the "conventional."

Considering that in the course of his nine-year choreographic career Mr. Dunn has strung a dancer upside down by block and tackle, lain on top of a high wooden maze for seven weeks and withstood a volley of rubber balls thrown at him by the audience, "Foot Rules" is on the conventional side.  For one thing, it is pure, somewhat Cunninghamesque dance.  For another, it has a cohesive shape.  "I'm interested in making discrete pieces now.  I've wanted to say everything I had to say.  Every piece was the ultimate piece.  That's not at all what I'm worried about at this particular moment.  I'm beginning to understand a bunch of material as a separate thing.  It's just because I haven't been there.  I tend to get interested in what I haven't done before."

Though his career sounds like a chronicle of avant-garde dance in New York, Mr. Dunn began his professional life as the squire Benno in the Princeton Ballet Society's production of "Swan Lake."  After an "uneventful" childhood in Palo Alto, Calif., he had enrolled in Princeton University as an art history major.  "I had done a lot of sports as a child but I gave it up at Princeton to study more.  I didn't miss it, but I missed the physical activity."  Someone suggested dancing so Mr. Dunn began to study with Andrée Estey in 1963 and performed with her company in Princeton, N.J., for two years.

He spent the summer of 1963 at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival school, studying with Margaret Craske, Ted Shawn, Matteo and Gus Solomons Jr.  He also appeared in a piece with the ethnologist and choreographer La Meri, whose “flamboyance” he admired. “And I realized that dance was not necessarily just learning a tradition but something that was possible given a number of people in a room at one time.”

After college, it was on to New York and the Joffrey Ballet school, jobs as a mailboy and a city welfare worker, and a course in the psychology of art at the New School.  “By 10 P.M., forget it!”  The urge to simplify his life lead him to a Connecticut prep school where he taught English and Spanish and coached tennis, basketball and cross-country running fro three years.

By 1968, he was back in New York City.  “I had the ambition of being a dance critic.”  His eyes crinkle with amusement at the thought.  “I had saved enough money from teaching to live on for a year but I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to take some classes from Merce Cunningham.

“Those classes immediately changed my life. It had something to do with the rhythm of Merce’s classes, with the lack of what by then I understood as irrelevant talking in class.  And when I walked into class I sensed that he had resolved a whole series of intellectual, esthetic questions that had been bothering me for years, things that mostly came up for me through literature rather than dance, stuff you get sucked into if you study the philosophy of art: what’s good and bad in art, how you make something. I understood my attraction to questions like that was misplaced. I was interested in processes and things that had been made, the experience itself, but I had studied the remnants. Merce clearly had never bothered, or had found a way to jump past it. So, besides the pleasure of the class, he then became someone I wanted to be around.”

Shortly afterward, Mr. Dunn began to work with Yvonne Rainer, and in February 1969 appeared in her concert in the historic dance series at the Billy Rose Theater.  After that, he began work with her company on “Continuous Project – Altered Daily,” a two-year accumulative piece.  “And that summer, just when I had run out of money,” Mr. Dunn recalls, “Merce wrote offering me a job.”  For three years he juggled schedules to appear with both the Cunningham company and Grand Union.

There hadn’t been anything like Grand Union and may never be again.  The exultantly scruffy group included Mr. Dunn, David Gordon, Barbara Dilley (then Barbara Lloyd, another Princeton Ballet Society graduate), Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown and Nancy Lewis, all hallowed names in the avant-garde dance hagiography and all Cunningham students who had studied at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College.  Several had participated in the iconoclastic composition courses given by Robert and Judith Dunn at the Judson Dance Theater in the mid-1960’s.

Together, they engaged in a freewheeling, unstructured improvisational performances, a format that had grown out of their work on Miss Rainer’s “Continuous Project.” “That piece ran 20 minutes at the start.”  Mr. Dunn says. “The last time we performed it, which was at the Whitney Museum, I think, we had two hours of material and Yvonne was already starting to say, ‘Alright, you don’t have to do this in any order and you can bring in props and bits of your own.’ I think it was partly motivated by her desire to get out of the role of, as she put it, boss lady, and as she turned her role around we picked it up.

“By 1970, Grand Union had begun. Our first thought was to rehearse – that’s what dancers do, right? – and make structures that didn’t displease us. After a year or so we came to the conclusion that what we liked best was to perform, so we never rehearsed.  Everything was included, like talking, or playing your favorite or least favorite record.”  Observers recall that Mr. Dunn, who stood out in the Cunningham company for his sleepy, slightly irritable look, tended to dance by himself and could be relied upon, as one observer put it, to “be doing something interesting in his corner.”

Mr. Dunn cites the dance critic, Edwin Denby, as a continuing influence. The rigor and simplicity of Mr. Cunningham’s experiments have inspired him.  Another indelible influence was his first film, Charles Atlas’s “Mayonnaise,” in which Mr. Dunn walked onto the set dressed in clothes that felt peculiar to him, provided only with the instruction to keep his left elbow on a green sawhorse.

And Mr. Dunn recalls with admiration the development of the “contact improvisation” form by Mr. Paxton, perhaps the devil’s advocate of Grand Union, a form of purely physical, almost athletic improvisation in which dancers’ bodies balance, collide, and act as levers for each other.  “I think contact improvisation is the most brilliant dance position that exists,” Mr. Dunn says, “an esthetic position that is irrefutable an undeniable. It’s avoided art, leadership, the super-individual of modern dance. Within a dance context it achieved a number of social positions of the late 1960’s to which I’m sympathetic: decentralization, lack of hierarchy, sexual ‘de-differentiation’ – all that stuff.”

He also collaborated with several experimental choreographers and appeared briefly with Twyla Tharp. “I was in love with Sara Rudner, one of her dancers. I went to visit Sara one summer when she was rehearsing on Twyla’s farm, and it was a question of whether I would bring in the hay with Hout (Robert Huot, Miss Tharp’s former husband) or work in the attic on a piece called ‘The One Hundreds.’ I did a little of both but I tended to want to do dancing.”

Mr. Dunn’s first independent piece was “Time Out,” a 70-minute, seven part solo created in 1973 that began with a dance in which he slowly changed positions and held them. “It had to do with joints and fitting in a corner. At the time, and for a while after, I seemed to go to extremes, being very formalistic, with no complex rhythms or images, but also very expressionistic as, for example, in that first section, when I opened my mouth, then my eyes, at the end. It was freaky. Later, I tried to bring those two extremes together, but what happened was my work was very static.”

In “Performance Exhibition 101,” the maze piece, he lay so still that visitors sometimes did not even see him as they explored the maze during the four hours a day his loft was open to the public, although one visitor gently moved his arm and, on the final day he was set upon by several visitors.

In “Celeste,” a piece created in 1977 for 40 students at the American Dance Festival, there were three “secrets.” “I wanted them to attempt to perform from an attitude rather than a structure. It was a lot about surprise, being ready for anything, mental work.”

But, unlike some of his colleagues, Mr. Dunn is not interested in sharing the nature of the dance’s structure with the audience. “I don’t understand the audience wanting to know how a dance is made. I don’t know how to build a building, but that doesn’t stop me from seeing buildings.” He is also uninterested in physical humor or emotional coloration that may be read into his purer dance pieces, which started with his 1975 “Gestures in Red” and included the sprawling “Lazy Madge” and the somewhat more elegant “Rilles.”

“I don’t work from an idea. I decide to make something. Then I make steps. I think about where the person goes next, the rhythm and shape of the steps. It’s like cooking. Obviously you want to make something tasty, but what you think about are the ingredients. I never make ‘effects.’ If you try to make someone feel something, then you know what it’s about and my work is what I don’t know about.”

He speaks admiringly of Mr. Cunningham’s “Field Dances.” “It had a tremendous potential for confusion, like traffic, like the street, a tremendous potential for accident.”

And clutter? “Not if you enjoy looking at traffic, and I do.”

But only one of the three long windows in his studio is unshuttered.  He smiles slightly. “At this point my work has a process of its own. I don’t need to watch the street.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, September 16, 1979