sarma

A solo concert is a tricky thing. A fine performer impresses you with his/her skill and versatility; a poor one makes you feel trapped, as if you were sharing a train compartment with a chattering, small-minded person. But Douglas Dunn produces another effect. I always feel that dancing is just something important and interesting that he does. Occasionally he does this publicly, and then I go to him to be danced for the way I might go to a priest to be shriven or a doctor to be healed.

He begins his new solo, "Gestures in Red," lying on his back on the pale, clean floor of Merce Cunningham's studio, beneath windows that display New York's light-studded sky. Slowly he scuds around the room on his back -pushing with his feet. He stops, raises his body into a half-sitting, half-reclining position and turns his head sideways to stare past us. Where have I seen that before? Suddenly I remember the Mayan stone men which archaeologists call Chac Mool; this is the squared-off position they wait in -the flattened curve of their bellies holding a bowl for sacrificial blood.

This whole first section seems to be about ways of moving backward. Dunn rolls back and inverts himself into shoulder stands. He runs backward and lets his weight pull him down into a skidding sit. He walks rather ceremoniously backward; occasionally he considers altering the direction of his big, deep steps and hovers on the verge of a new path the way a weather vane waits to sense the groove of the wind. At last, he runs forward and leaps suddenly and lightly onto one of the windowsills. And the lights go out.

During the entire next section of "Gestures in Red", he stays in one spot and moves his arms, head, torso. He has a curious adventure with his forearms: he crouches slightly, laying his arms along his thighs as if to hunker down and rest, but his arms keep slipping away and failing. He works on this casually over and over. It's fascinating to watch someone not doing something you know he could do had he not imposed some mysterious limitation on himself.

The third part is a foot dance. Dunn's feet are up to any number of tricks -sliding and inching along the floor, pulling his long, quiet body with them. We laugh: at times he looks so like an old hoofer dancing in his sleep. During this section and the last complicated, hard-to-follow, everything-in-it part, I'm constantly amazed by the dancing; it never turns out the way I expect, and the dynamic texture of it is far more variegated than that of most dance-work I see. Yet Dunn never looks as if he's doing anything arbitrary or clever. He makes the most stumbling, doubled-back-on-themselves movements appear to flow subtly into each other. Sometimes his long slim body looks gangling, almost awkward; sometimes he looks as watchful and uncertain as a wading bird; sometimes he looks poised and extremely elegant. But always he looks intelligent and interesting and like a man you could trust.