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THE DANCE ENTHUSIAST ASKS: Douglas Dunn on Creation, Collaboration & Surprising Himself

Douglas Dunn + Dancers Perform for 2 Weeks at Judson Memorial Church

ABOUT: Douglas Dunn, a pivotal figure in postmodern dance, returns to Judson Memorial Church for a two-week season of performances that highlight his unique approach to movement and collaboration.

The first week features BODY/SHADOW, an experimental opera that plays with perception, shadow, and form, while the second week unveils L'Embarqement pour Cythère, a world premiere blending dance, poetry, and live music.

In conversation with The Dance Enthusiast’s Theo Boguszewski, Dunn offers a candid glimpse into his process, philosophy, and the ideas shaping his latest works, including his ever-present desire to create something new.

WHEN: February 19 - March 1, 2025

WHERE: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South New York, NY

TICKETS: Click here

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Douglas Dunn: Oh there's another attendee in here. “Fireflies AI Notetaker.”  What's that?

Theo Boguszewski for The Dance Enthusiast: Oh, yeah, that's a robot. It’s taking notes.

We don't get to see the robot? Oh, god. They had a robot performance at BAM some years ago. My objection was not that they were robots, but they weren't pretty. You know, if they're going to make robots, why don't they make them… attractive?

Last year I interviewed Sydney Skybetter, who is involved in the field of Choreorobotics. Fascinating conversation. But anyway, I'm here to talk to you about your upcoming season. Can you share a little bit about your relationship with Judson Memorial Church over the years?

I was away at college during the great moment of Judson, early 60s, but I fell in with all those people when I came back to New York in 1968. I have performed there many times in various guises. I just love being there, both historically speaking and just atmospherically.

Both the pieces I’m presenting this month I imagined in the round. The space is very, very good for that. For BODY/ SHADOW, we moved each trio around the space at various timed intervals so the audience, if they just sat where they were, would see all the different trios. With the new piece,  L'Embarqement pour Cythère, it's the same and very different because there's no dividing up the space like that. The only thing that's going to articulate the space is the choreography itself.

So you’re presenting two pieces, BODY/SHADOW and a world premiere, L'Embarqement pour Cythère. Tell me about the world premiere.

I don't know if you know about my crazy title search. In the 70s, a lot of us were thinking about making a dance as a kind of problem solving. You know, you have a formal issue and you work it out. I was feeling a resurgence of that energy in me, and I was reading this science book and I came across this fantastic title, “The Three Body Problem.” It was so down-to-earth, no radiance of any kind of metaphorical anything. And I lived with it for a couple of years and then I actually started making the piece. The first version of the first section of the piece I made was on NYU students, and I called it the “The Three Body Problem.”

And then this novel appeared out of China, and it was translated into English, and became a movie and a TV thing. And it was called “The Three Body Problem.” And so all of a sudden this title, which I thought was so neutral and down-to-earth, was in the mainstream media! And I thought, “Oh, no, no, no.” Because I didn't want to be associated with all these ideas that were coming around about this novel, which is hugely political. It's all about the Chinese revolution. And I thought, no, this is impossible. So I then struggled to find a new title in a way that I have NEVER had to struggle before. It was ripping me apart.

But then I arrived at this very different title: L'Embarqement pour Cythère. It’s a reference to Watteau. It's like his most famous painting. For me this is a complete reversal because I've always loved modest titles that don't tell you very much.

I was an art history major at Princeton, and I studied the Western European tradition mostly. And my least favorite period was Rococo. But somehow this painting came to mind and I just gradually was pulled toward it. And it became ironic to me to use a title about a period that I didn't like. It gave me a thrill. And then, of course, I had to deal with the consequences of it. It’s still flowing through me. I don't even quite know how I chose it, except a strong feeling that I'm going back in time to this frivolous, decadent period of art.

I could have used the English title, “Voyage to Cynthera”. But then I got stubborn. I said, well, I not only want to go to this strange place artistically, aesthetically, but I also want to force people to face an unpronounceable title. So I'm being kind of naughty here. I want to force people to go somewhere where they aren't.

And then I had to ask myself, “Do I want to stay with my original vision of the dance?” Probably because of this convolution about the title, I've added three people to the piece. My wife Grazia, who always claims she doesn't want to do another dance with me, but then always comes around. And Anne Waldman. Anne is the poet. So the three of us are going to be facetious representations of the people in this painting.

And Mimi Gross, with whom I've worked since 1979 on many, many, projects, is doing all of the design stuff. I had this idea of having a chariot-like conveyance and to have Anne reading in the chariot as Grazia and I wheel her around. So the dance is the dance, and then the three of us, as these interlopers from the 18th century, are going to come in between and have a different look, a facetious reference to this period and this stupid idea of getting out of our present time. Because why would you want to leave the present time when it's so great in America now? When everything's so wonderful?

Beyond the title, what were some of your other inspirations for the piece? 

Do you know Tere O'Connor? He and I are friendly, and he was here at my loft for some event recently, and we chatted afterwards. And I told Tere that I really like that he made this continuous piece; it’s an hour or so, and he never broke it, never by lighting or anything. No sections. I said, “Tere all my life I've always wanted to make a piece that just went along like that with no breaks.” And when I went to first imagine this piece, I was gonna try to do that. But I've totally failed. And the piece evolved (or devolved) into four sections, but now we're breaking the sections with the poetry. So I failed in this ambition, which, if I live long enough, I may someday try to do again.

But I'm very happy with what's happening. I have this long standing fascination with trios. This piece starts out as two trios that mildly try to get together. And then another section, I tried to make an imitation of the first section with the other six dancers. And then the third section is still in process.

It’s hard to break your own habits, right?

Well, I don't mind the habits in the sense that they charge me up and make me want to work. But the idea that there is this other dance out there that I've never made is also enticing.

Do you feel like you've been after that throughout your career — making the dance that you haven't made yet?

I think of it more oppositionally. Like, I make a dance and then the next one turns out to be some sort of response to that. Not a continuation, but rather “what's the other side of that?”

Another element for me historically is that I don’t like watching unison.  Even though I was fascinated with Balanchine. But I was more interested in his musicality than his unisons. One of the first pieces I made way back had unison in it. And I remember after I made it, I thought, “okay, I'm never going to do that again”. Unison is just too safe and too simple.

And so for many, many years I didn’t do any. And then in the last few years it's come back. I work intuitively, so I don't necessarily question these urges.

I want to talk a little bit about collaboration. When you create movement, is it a collaborative process with your cast?

I'll say no. The first time I ever worked with dancers other than myself — I did a lot of solo stuff in the 70s – and then in 76 I wanted to see if I could work with other dancers. And I made a piece called “Lazy Madge,” and I customized everything I made. The material I made on a particular dancer or dancers was only for them. Everybody had their own material. I had said to myself, I want to make a really messy image, I was again responding to unison. All the dance I was seeing at that time to me was way too neat, too careful, too pretty. I used to call it “hygienic.”

So I made all this material, and then when we went to perform, I told the dancers, “you may do any of the material that I've made for you, whenever you want, with whatever facing of the four fronts you want”. So the dancers had choices of that. They didn't have choice of the material, but they had a choice of how to.

And then when I finished that project in '78 or so, again I had a reaction. I said, okay, that was fun and it made a very interesting messy image of the kind I exactly wanted. But wow, I didn't control that. And I’m feeling a little ashamed, so from now on, I'm only going to control everything. I'm going to make all the space and all the timing, including all the material.

I was doing stuff all through the 70s, 80s, 90s, I was just working intuitively. But now I understand that what interests me about dancing and art in general is what I like to call individual vision. I want to see one person's vision; that’s of great interest to me.

Who were some of your main collaborators over the years, and how do you reconcile this idea of individual vision within these collaborations? 

 I started working with Mimi Gross in 1979, and I knew her just as part of the downtown scene. I don't remember exactly how I met her, but the scene down here in the 70s was completely flowing and everybody seemed to just mix and match. We somehow decided to do a piece together at the original Kitchen, and we liked working together. But the working together was always in that tradition of “I'm making a dance. You can come watch if you want, but I want you to decide what you want to do and do it.” Often Mimi would come and watch something and immediately have an historical reference, like “Oh, you're dealing with Egypt.” I said “Not really. But if you want to go there, you can."

The other main collaborator in terms of design I work with is Charles Atlas. He’s a video artist who was part of the Cunningham Company. I was with Cunningham until 73. We did a lot of collaborating over the years. So he and Mimi are the two people I've collaborated most on design, costumes, even lighting. My attitude is in the Cage/Cunningham tradition, you let the collaborator do what they want. You don’t necessarily get together and have long meetings about what should happen.

One time I collaborated with Robert Ashley, and we got together and we had a meeting about what we're going to do together. I already had in mind quite a bit of the piece that I wanted to make. We got together and talked for about an hour and we had two things we both liked: Venetian Blinds and Triangles. So this was our meeting ground.

I also worked for a number of years with David Ireland, who is a San Francisco artist. And he was completely no talk. His work was of the kind where you walk into one of his installations, and you're not quite sure what he did or didn't do. He put up these strange panels on the side at La Mama which might have been there before. He loved to surprise me. Sometimes I would not see what it was going to be until we got into the space for the first time. We toured in Europe together, and he would always come up with amazing, surprising things in the theater or wherever we were. We had a lot of fun together.

I've never really had a problem giving my collaborators a lot of reign. I really like to give the person a huge amount of room to work, and I don't judge it. And, the thing that you finally make together has these different individual visions. 

 It's interesting that you're thinking about individual vision in terms of the thing that's in your control. But then there's these other things that are outside of your control.

Right. I do mean medium to medium in terms of individual vision. Good point.

And it's true, I don't conceive of the whole thing. I want these different people to come at it from different angles.

My way of working has always been one step at a time. I say, do this, and then I feel that move, and that move somehow tells me what the next move might be. You make a step, then you make another step, and the steps start talking to one another, and you develop something, and finally you have a dance. So you start with the small, and you work toward the larger. But as I've gotten older and I can't make material on my own body easily, I start to have ideas. So sometimes now I have structural ideas that aren't coming right out of my body moment to moment. They're coming more from my mind when I'm lying down doing my stretching. So then I am working somewhat from structural ideas that have occurred to me while I'm doing nothing.

What about in the case of, for instance, a commission? Do you have circumstances where your vision for a piece has to be shaped or molded by where the funding's coming from?

That's a great question. I really don't like that sort of thing, you know, oh, I'm going to make a dance on the theme of … whatever. In 1980, the Paris Opera and the Autumn Festival invited me to set Stravinsky's "Pulcinella" on the Paris Opera Dancers. And the two leads, the “etoiles”, were very welcoming, and we became very good friends. And six years later, they invited me to come back and work with them to make a trio for a festival in Paris called “Droll de Dance.” It was a comedic dance festival.

First of all, the piece didn't go over that well with the critics. They didn't like it because it wasn't really funny. Because in France everything is either tragic or comedic. There's no merging. So I don't like the idea of thematic on any level; I don't like a festival saying all the dance is going to be about whatever.

I’ve learned that my work often has a layer of irony or humor that's not the foreground. It's more irony than humor. I certainly have never tried to be funny, but it turns out I am sometimes both, personally as a performer, and the work itself has these layers which are sort of making fun of themselves, you know? And isn't it kind of preposterous, dancing? The bigger picture of putting your body out there in front of other people to look at?

As an art student, I was totally serious. What's the period? What's the style? And then I met a man who, when he looked at paintings, he had an emotional epiphany because of the painting. I thought, oh, that's a different way of looking at things. And that completely changed my life because instead of coming at things intellectually, which is the way I grew up, I started relating things emotionally, or combination thereof. Right. Which is the most exciting — they’re both vibrating.

Well, because doesn’t a dance also incorporate the perspective of the audience member?

 Well, that sort of became a lineage. Once people got from Graham to Cunningham. Not that there wasn't a lot else going on. But it’s my lineage, so I talk about it.

Merce had a studio with Joseph Campbell, the guy who wrote about myths. And Campbell was married to Jean Erdman, a choreographer.  She made a famous piece called “The Coach with the Six Insides” – it was a mythical evocation based on her husband’s writing. And Merce was right there alongside them. And if you look at some of his early titles, you can see that he was messing around in that same mental arena of myth, association, tradition… And then he met John Cage, and John said, “Stop there, don’t do that. Just make a dance.” And so by the early 60s, he made this absolutely stunning, radical shift into … what do you want to call it? “Just DANCING”.

You see the dancer as a body moving in space, as Merce would say. I don't like the word “reduction,” but the narrowing of the focus to get rid of all the illusions and all the extraneous stuff around a dance and just be right there with that thing.

 According to your press release, your new piece BODY / SHADOW, “raises the question, what is more real, a body or its shadow”? Can you share how you got to that concept? 

 BODY / SHADOW was a way more integrated collaboration. I've been working with this man named Brice Brown. He's much younger than I am and he's full of ideas and he said, “I want to make a multifaceted thing. I'm going to call it an opera. And I want to make a book and some music and a performance.” And I said, “great, let's do it.” So the first thing we did was he came to the loft and we set up a huge screen and I chose one of the dancers I work with, Jin Ju Song-Begin. And I made 20 one-minute solos for her — because that's what he asked for. So we made all this video material. And then we made a book. A beautiful, complicated book which has a CD in it and a lot of photographs.

Jin Ju Song-Begin in "BODY / SHADOW." Photo: Steve Gibson

And then he said, “okay, now next is the performance.” So we start talking about how to make the performance. We wanted to have a screen in front of which a dancer would dance and a projector would project light and imagery. And we had many, many versions before we arrived at the one we now use, which is five trios, and each trio has a piece of material which is like a screen. And we use these solos I made, plus more. So each time there's a solo, the two other dancers hold the screen up manually.

And so the origin of the piece in every respect was a collaboration between me and Bryce, and we're both very happy with the result. And then he had this musician Paul Botelho. Paul ends up being a wandering presence in the piece. He has a mic that he sings into. And there's also a recorded thing playing over the speakers. So we had that and then we both decided that it was a little too neat. So we added two wandering presences, who are dressed completely differently and are mischief makers — they can't interrupt the dancer's movement, but they can imitate them and make fun of them.

BODY / SHADOW is Brice's title, not mine. And that rhetoric about the body and the shadow and what's more real is more or less his idea. But I must say it does, it is quite consistent with my sense of, you know, “is the body real?”

I noticed a long time ago that there are so many people who use the word “self” in so many different ways. Does anybody really know who he or she is? You know, this whole element of identity, which has gotten so politicized. But, who are we? What are we? And so BODY / SHADOW brings up that same question.

Going back to something that you mentioned earlier about not liking things to be too safe. Is this something that you actively respond to when you make work? Or maybe you feel like you're trying to always do something that you've never done before, instead of leaning back on something that you know that you're good at?

Well, because I have worked a long time now, I notice when things recur. Just roughly 10 years ago, if I noticed that I was starting to do some particular move even that I recognized, I would either drop it right away or I would work hard to make it different so it wasn't as much like the other thing.

But in the last few years, I object a little less when I do something that I have done before, and it's because it's in such a big mix of things, these larger pieces, that I haven't done before in terms of the larger scale. But overall, I am always trying to be different. I want to be new to myself all the time.

This is not helpful in terms of career, you probably can imagine, because people want to identify what he does, like, 'Oh yeah, that kind of thing.; You have to be more consistent to be recognized. But I just never cared. Why can't people see something new every time and be turned on by that? It's just my own personality. I do not want to be bored by myself. What can I do that would surprise me? That was always my attitude. 

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