by Leigh Witchel
You’d never know from the looks of it that Douglas Dunn invited you to his memorial service. Filled with sly humor and implied morbidity, “Garden Party” was part idyll, part acid trip, that made you think of gardens, nature and the inevitable return to the earth.
The company’s loft space was turned by his frequent collaborator, Mimi Gross, into a fluorescent grove with green and orange hedges and banks of pink and fuchsia bulbs. The costumes, also by Gross, were leotards or unitards in floral and neon colors, with many additional pieces to change and exchange. As we settled in, Tosh Sheridan sat on a bench, discreetly strumming a guitar until the space was cleared to begin.
Dunn set the work to a discrete collage: sometimes readings, sometimes songs, sometimes instrumentals, sometimes silence. It began with a slow deliberate reading by Stephanie Jacco of a poem from al-Andalus a millennium ago: “Is there no way I might open my heart with a knife?”
Dunn’s resume is varied and impressive, dancing with Cunningham but also as a member of the improvisational collective Grand Union. His palette uses Cunningham’s clean phrasing; the dancers tilted, extended their legs and transferred weight in neat combinations. There wasn’t just dry movement; they would gesture – shaking a fist or knocking – to add texture.
Dunn, who turned 80 last year, was sitting quietly on a chair partly hidden in a poster-board rose bower, with only his top half visible as if were a gnome lying in wait, or as if he had also been planted. The lights dimmed and Grazia Della-Terza, his wife, entered the space. She was wearing a loose shift and her gray hair was in a short bob. She stayed at the corner looking around querulously as we heard her in voice-over, reading from a poem by Rilke. “For however mysterious death is, life is even more so.”
Dunn emerged from his bower to do a solo of slow gestures and poses to recorded guitar. When he was done, he walked back to his seat. He was vibrant, but his range and force was restricted. He looked his age; it felt very human. Another clue of leave-taking, the use of a duet by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, “If This is Goodbye,” which was inspired by the phone calls made from United flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Dunn put on a skullcap of green leaves as women posed like statuary, then he came out again with a scroll and lipsynched a recording of him declaiming Milton: “As thou from year to year hast sung too late for my relief.”
Dunn choreographed a dance to Offenbach’s Barcarolle, for women doing repeated grands battements. But as it went on, your eyes strayed to him as you noticed him slowly raising and flourishing a blue, stuffed plush bird.
Much of the wit lay in those congruences that weren’t quite congruent. Four couples interacted to, but didn’t act out an argument from Molière’s “The Misanthrope.” Or when Jacco said on the recording, “We are not so unalike” and the dancers jumped in the silence, creating a downbeat. Perhaps the biggest surprise was a note of cheap sentimentality, when Dunn used Extreme’s “More than Words,” one of the most anodyne of pop numbers.
Della-Terza came to Dunn, gently helped him change his costume, giving him a new cap, then slowly danced and swayed away. “Garden Party” felt homespun, informal and soundly composed.
A quintet slowly entered, holding iridescent garments they would never wear in the piece. They put the clothes in front of them and lay down, as if falling asleep after a ball. The music segued from a Scarlatti sonata to chant by Dufay. Christoper Williams and Paul Singh did a slow adagio in the back as the others walked off, taking their outfits with them.
In a moment straight out of “Fantasia,” Bach’s Toccata in D-Minor sounded. Lauren Parrish’s psychedelic lighting grew dark and shadowy as the dancers clambered and spun. Dunn remained deadpan, but like the inflatable bird, you could tell he was pulling your leg when he posed in his bower, holding a small planetary orb like a maker of worlds, but on a Horton-Hears-a-Who scale.
Singh and Williams, now wearing long white pleated skirts, entered with a barre, placing it at the back. Vanessa Knouse and Jin Ju Song-Begin entered, wearing the same skirts, but went to the back, facing away from us, and removed their skirts, exposing themselves almost nude, except for black thongs as they exchanged skirts – even though the skirts were identical.
The exchange was repeated by Singh and Williams, but Williams looked as if he wasn’t wearing anything underneath his skirt. Re-robed, the two men strolled towards us arm in arm and then pranced off. Dunn danced between Janet Charleston and Knouse, then they flung him away.
Moments seemed to hint at autobiography. Della-Terza entered to dance dreamily until she sat on the bench with Dunn. They acted out a comic scene from a 1946 film, “The Time, The Place and The Girl,” talking about four decades of marriage. The two danced, then reseated themselves as the others bounced and turned. A song from the movie played in a tinny recording, “I know that it’s you I love.”
And then, Della-Terza and Dunn walked to the center, but Dunn kept going, leaving her behind. She walked back to the bench, he crouched down to the earth. To keep the metaphor from being too apparent, later he did return to her and the bench. The cast returned, and lay on the floor, stretching as Dunn and Della-Terza leaned and posed.
Bach’s “St. John Passion” played, and just when it seemed as if “Garden Party” should wrap up, the dancers stretched up and out from the floor and the lights went out.
For someone who has every right to take himself and his age very seriously, Dunn didn’t seem to. As valedictory as it was, “Garden Party” was also the right mix of dance and nuttiness. If this is goodbye, Douglas, and I hope it isn’t yet, thank you for giving us a peek at your acid-tinged paradise.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Garden Party” – Douglas Dunn + Dancers
Douglas Dunn Studio, New York, NY
April 25, 2023
Cover: Douglas Dunn (center), Alexandra Berger and Janet Charleston in “Garden Party.” Photo © Jacob Burckhardt
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