Douglas Dunn's Dance Idyll, With Undertows of Darkness

New York Times

27-02-2025

'L' Embarquement pour Cythère,' a 1717 painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau, depicts lovers having a party on an island. They are paired off near a statue of Venus, with encouraging Cupids flying about. Douglas Dunn's new dance shares a title with the painting, along with some of its pastoral charm and idealization of the past. But this idyll — the work of a choreographer now in his 80s, known for his wit and whimsy — is troubled by a darker present.
The dance, which Douglas Dunn + Dancers debuted on Wednesday in the second half of a two-week season at Judson Memorial Church, is presented in the round. Jerome Begin's score, played live by the violin duo String Noise with Begin on electronics, evokes at first an underwater realm, like Neptune's Garden. Dancers skitter on, grouping themselves not in the painting's couples but in two same-gender trios. Their movements are courtly, ceremonial, but then, periodically, bestial or bullish. Both modes gesture at antiquity.
Sections of dance like this alternate with sections in which the poet Anne Waldman is wheeled around in a chariot by Dunn and his longtime partner, Grazia Della-Terza, both attired (by Mimi Gross) in Renaissance garb. Between Waldman's fluttery conjurer's recitation, her unclear diction and the church's echoey acoustics, it can be difficult to decipher much of what she's saying. That's a pity, because her words (supplied to me after the show) are cascadingly associative, allusive poems about the painting and the dance, about enemies of beauty and whether art is antidote or merely a brief escape.
The second section of dancing, featuring a different set of six dancers, seems to be set more in the Renaissance. At least that's my association with the lutelike pizzicato of the violins. The choreography is circular in design, often inscribed with smaller circles in the compositional shape of a canon or round. It's still idyllic, but partway through, Begin introduces buzzing electronic bass notes, like a serpent in Eden or death in Arcadia.
Waldman's text, even if comprehended only in fragments, suggests what the danger could be: a dark age, end time, something dissolving, tyrants, despots (who talk of living on Mars). Against this, Dunn offers more of what he always has: intelligent form and whimsy. All 12 dancers circle now, stopping to strike well-balanced, three-person fountain poses, but also overlapping and interchanging intricately. While Begin's score gathers momentum, the choreography mainly resists, remaining stately or still.
Then, without altering tone or manner, the dance bursts into multiplicity, with each dancer doing his or her own thing, hopping around or slowly balancing while Waldman recites in their midst. Complex but not chaotic, this has the look of what Merce Cunningham, in whose company Dunn danced long ago, described as the art of nature, a composition with lots of things in it, all different, yet each affecting the others. A word that Waldman repeats with a positive spin applies well to the vision: 'entanglement.'
Such multiplicity is the chief choreographic strength of the piece featured in the first week of Dunn's season, the 2023 experimental opera 'Body/Shadow.' This sui generis work features the odd performer ratio of 17 dancers and one singer — the composer, Paul J. Botelho.
He wanders among the dancers dressed like an amateur naturalist or an eccentric explorer, a gentle and curious fellow festooned with cameras, carrying a sack filled with equipment and knickknacks that he offers to audience members. He sings wordlessly in a countertenor, employing extended vocal techniques to chirp, weep, trill and speak sibilantly in something like the snake language of Harry Potter movies.
As Botelho does this for an hour, the dancers stay in nearly ceaseless motion, only one or two of them leaving the stage and then only for moment, perhaps to don a Zebra head. Occasionally, they extend sheets as screens for projections and shadow play. But mostly they gracefully execute a series of short phrases, in a saltimbanque, or traveling player, style similar to that of 'L'Embarquement,' that add up to an overabundance. Watched with soft-focus attention, it's a planetary wonder.
In 'L'Embarquement,' that vision extends too long, across a false ending as the lights fade and the violins sound as though they're sliding off the edge of the earth. But even the overextension, the refusal to stop pumping out steps and patterns, is affecting. Colored by Waldman's words, the harmonious multiplicity might be seen as pluralism, a beneficent entanglement currently under threat. Certainly, 'L'Embarquement' is a pledge of allegiance to the imagination and once-again embattled art.