The Brooklyn Rail

Douglas Dunn + Dancers will present the world premiere of L’Embarqement pour Cythère as part of their two-week season at Judson Memorial Church. The evening-length work for twelve dancers choreographed by Douglas Dunn features new poetry by Anne Waldman, visual design by Mimi Gross, and a commissioned score by Jerome Begin played live by Begin and String Noise.

L’Embarqement pour Cythère is the latest collaboration in a long list of performance and literary projects spanning more than forty years by the Bessie Award-winning choreographer and the acclaimed experimental poet.

Dunn and Waldman recently spoke with the Brooklyn Rail about their enduring creative partnership, artistic lineage, and Merce Cunningham.

Caedra Scott-Flaherty (Rail): When did you two first meet? And how?

Anne Waldman: We were just joking about that because it’s always the first question when you’ve worked with somebody for so long. And it’s hard to remember the exact moment. I was certainly aware of who Douglas was. In our downtown art scene, you were very aware of other things going on, even if you didn’t know people personally. I was claiming to have introduced Douglas, after a show we had together at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s—in the same place as Danspace Project—to Edwin Denby. Denby was such an important poet, but also an extraordinary dance critic and thinker. I always linked Douglas with him in my mind because when I got to know Douglas, he had an incredible brilliance of the “minute particulars”—the term William Carlos Williams uses for details—noticing everything with each individual dancer and what they’re capable of. His work was not pointing to an idea or a message or an identity or fitting into some faddish thing. It transcends time and place. I find it very demanding and beautiful. This new piece is intricate and extraordinary.

Douglas Dunn: I love this because my memory of meeting Anne is the opposite. What I remember—and I know memory is tricky like this—is standing in front of St. Mark’s Church with Edwin, whom I already knew slightly, introducing me to Anne! And I remember my absolute first reaction. I remember what she was wearing, which I won’t repeat now. But I remember having an instantaneous reaction of “I’ve never met a woman like this.” And I wanted to know her right away.

And thank you, Anne, for all those descriptions. I like “intricate” very much for this piece because it’s long. In it, Anne and my wife Grazia Della-Terza and I are people from another time and place, costumed very differently from the other twelve dancers, and we come out between sections and then, in the final section, we join the dancers. So there are two worlds here—the world of the dancers and the world of these three interlopers who take off from the painting, the title of which I finally chose as the title for the piece.

Rail: So is the dance based on Jean-Antoine Watteau’s painting?

Dunn: I wouldn’t go that far. I started imagining this piece about three years ago. And I’ve done two full-length pieces since then. When I started, I wanted to go back to a seventies feeling about titles and do a very brass-tacks thing. Because it was based on trios, it was going to be called The Three-Body Problem, from classical mechanics and astronomy. But then I learned a science-fiction novel written by a Chinese author, Cixin Liu, in the early part of the century—which I’d never heard of—had been translated into English with this title and became a movie and then a television series. I decided I didn’t want to be part of that mainstream conversation, so I gave up the title and then had a terrible time finding a new one because the other one had been so potent for me.

And then I went as far away from that title as you can go. I chose the name of a painting from a different century, from a period of art history that I don’t particularly like, and I decided to use the French instead of the English title of the artwork because I wanted to be difficult. [Laughs] The mainstream was overwhelming me, so I decided to reject it even more by being a little esoteric and a little more historical. The point, to me, was to emphasize the art of it. Of course, you could conjure something historical or political out of the painting, but that’s not why I’m using it.

Waldman: I find it so stimulating! I use the phrase “antithesis reality.” The painting and its title have a relationship to the Symbolist poets, particularly Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud to some extent. They were very charged. They’re coming later, of course, over a century later, but they’re inspired by this kind of buoyancy and slightly risqué behavior—like you see with the painting’s characters in extraordinary dress. Verlaine has a book called Fêtes Galantes, which is related to the Watteau period. It’s not A Season in Hell by any means, but it’s risqué in terms of some of these relationships—a threesome in a meadow having a picnic. A lot of the commedia dell’arte figures come up in these images and poems. They’re familiar to us as tropes, but right now I feel like we need to invoke them in our mental stream with the crazy times we’re in, which are so antithetical to human sensuous pleasure. So I’ve gone to Verlaine, I’ve embedded some of his phrases and references in my poems, and I’m finding I want a kind of buoyancy too. The dance is very buoyant. It’s ecstatic, really, walking in off the cold wintery streets of New York City and waiting to go to the island of Cythera. There’s a kind of aspirational, hallucinatory tableau quality to it. And the painting is very engaging. Human at its most entertaining.

But what Douglas makes his dancers do is beyond entertainment. It’s more sublime. It feels very unusual. There’s a Francis Poulenc musical composition that has the same title as the painting, and this particular painting is referenced for that idea of going somewhere, heading to the island in Greece. So it’s connected to other imaginative landscapes, places, holidays, and realms. It’s taking you back to the old tropes of poetry. When we talk about “getting away” these days, it has to be, you know, outer space.

Dunn: Yeah. How about “ironically frivolous”? I don’t really like to talk about irony, but I’m trying to look at my work differently because I came into dancing as an escape from other aspects of life that I’d sampled in some depth. And what I liked was that I was not part of the mainstream culture and world. I saw the modern dance world, especially downtown, as this sideshow, this fringe place of richness, which didn’t ever have to aspire to the mainstream culture. And that worked for about forty years.

I’m taken aback by the fact that the aesthetic accent in the arts has been pushed back and back and back, and I’m not going to go there. I’m seeing that my work is taking place in this environment, and kind of screws around with it. So the way Anne was describing the piece is absolutely beautiful and right, but then if you think about the context it is taking place in, it’s no longer a zeitgeist of aesthetic beauties. Most dance now is politically motivated and full of “content”—subject matter beyond formal dancing. So it’s become more what I’ve always wanted, in a way. Now I’m really on the outside! Not only of the mainstream culture in general but of the dance mainstream.

Waldman: I just finished writing a very long book Penguin is publishing called Mesopotopia (forthcoming August 2025). I love the cover. It’s a John Ashbery collage with a mechanical wind-up doll, empty at the back. It’s a little like an Alice-in-Wonderland figure. She has a paper airplane, and she’s standing in front of the Tower of Babel and throwing her airplane—throwing her poem—and seeing where it will go. That’s the mood I try to invoke. I want to vocalize and support people who are in trouble. I think what we do as artists is a kind of sanctuary. It’s a very demanding time, and there are so many people in need and suffering. But that doesn’t invalidate or contradict art. We have to live with these things or we’d just go totally mad. And so it’s been such a pleasure to be engaged with my work—the new book and now this performance.

Rail: I’m curious how your collaboration works. Douglas, how far along were you before you brought Anne in? And what was your guidance for her, or do you just give her free rein?

Dunn: The idea of Anne being part of the piece didn’t come up until I dropped the earlier title and vision. At first, I’d wanted it to be continuous, but then I started to see it in sections. And as the sections began to develop, I wondered how to connect them. I wanted something to happen there, not just more dancing. And then came the painting, and the new title, and I thought of Anne and her poetry in the interludes. But I didn’t want her to be out there all by herself, the way she would be in a reading she would give in a gallery or auditorium. I wanted it to be a more activated presence. So we developed this idea of the chariot. Grazia and I will wheel her around in a chariot when she comes out during the breaks in the dancing.

Mimi’s costumes for Anne and Grazia and me are ridiculous. They’re great. We’re like eighteenth-century people going to the Greek islands. We’re wearing our silly outfits, whereas the dancers are beautiful and dancerly.

Waldman: I have silver-pointed shoes with lovely silk petals at the top!

Rail: Will there be a backdrop?

Dunn: No. The audience will be in the round. There’s no front. All the movement I’ve made for this work considered that viewpoint—everybody in different places looking in—which is a lot of fun to work with. I’ve done it before, but never quite like this. For example, the first sextet I made, I was already thinking about the round, but I always sat on the same side of it while I was making it and rehearsing it. So when it came time to work on the whole piece, I moved the front of the sextet twice. I moved it an eighth of a turn this way, and about halfway through another eighth, so it rotates itself. And the other sextet comes out and it rotates too.

Rotation is a significant part of this new piece for me, as a formal theme. Before I started working on this, I noticed that when I do rotational things, I tend to go clockwise, which is just something in my body from my past. Maybe athletics. And so I made a conscious decision to make almost all the rotations, whether they be small or large, counterclockwise. And I tell you, every time I see it, I feel it in my body: “No, the other way!” These things are deep in there. And so to contradict them is very refreshing. It means you’re open. It changes your brain. Your brain starts to feel differently because you’re going against your kinetic habits.

Rail: Like brushing your teeth with the other hand!

Dunn: I’ve tried that. It’s very hard.

Waldman: I find the chariot an interesting challenge. It’s like a platform. And it keeps coming up. It comes up in tarot readings, and there’s something in my book I was proofing the other night. I thought, “Oh my god, another reference to a chariot!” And one of my Buddhist names is something like “swift chariot.” It’s an amazing object in the middle of this. It’s a treat to read my poetry with this framing. I’ve read in so many different kinds of places, but never a chariot.

Dunn: I love that. Also, Jerome Begin will be there with two people who play violin, and he, with his computer, is going to process the sound as they play. They’re going to be in the circle on risers, so they’ll be very present too. But we don’t have to know the music beforehand. All the dances are counted separately from his music. They are parallel to each other. But he has been coming to rehearsals and listening to what he’s making while he watches. We talked about the sections and how they’re similar and different. So he’s not totally off on his own doing something irrelevant. He’s trying to relate to what’s unfolding on stage.

Waldman: Well, I love this way of working. It’s in the lineages that Douglas and I have been part of. These simultaneous things going on. So much magic can come out of that.

Rail: Were there certain themes that you all were working with?

Waldman: For me, the first theme is this alternative reality. Antithesis. And the second is Endtime. The mind of Endtime. And then I thought the third would be Entanglement. But I’m not sure about that now, hearing you talk. Maybe Disentanglement.

Dunn: My themes are structural. Trios. And the question of: “Can groups, small or large, get together?” This is something I’ve tried twice before, and I never felt satisfied. It might be that I am cynical about groups getting together, and maybe I’m not wrong. Look at the politics of the world today! My work is not political, but maybe unconsciously I’m interested in that idea. This time I already feel more satisfied about what’s happening.

Waldman: Well, it’s a great ensemble. They really know this work. They love it. They’re teaching one another. They work together.

Dunn: You’re right. I’m so blessed. Many of these dancers I have worked with for a long time, and there are some newer ones in this group too. They’re all so generous. Nobody ever seems impatient; we take breaks and relax. There’s a kind of esprit in the group that I’m so happy about. It matters a lot.

Rail: I love that even the creation and teaching process began with a trio, which then expands. Where do you get ideas for your work?

Dunn: I’m dedicated to a rather formalistic attitude about choreography. Early on, I made pieces by making steps. I’d say, “Well what could happen after that step?” And of course, a lot of things were going on in my semi-consciousness about why one step leads to another, because I have a lot of history with dance, both looking at it and trying it out. So as opposed to having an idea about a dance, I made steps and then I assembled them.

But as I’ve gotten older and I can’t do as much physically, sometimes ideas about what I might do next come up when I’m lying down, like when I wake up in the morning. I lie there and think, “Oh, I’m having a dance idea. Okay!” And although I never ask dancers to make the steps themselves, the person standing in front of me—their presence and facility and personality—influences what I do. I make something I know that person can do, but I might also want to stretch them a little bit. In fact, one woman in this group who’s been in and out of my company for quite a few years said to me the other day, “Douglas, this is the hardest dance you’ve ever made for us!” Maybe she’s right, in terms of the density of it. The steps are perpetually turning back on themselves, often counterclockwise.

Rail: Do you feel you learned some of these dance-making processes from Merce Cunningham? Or were you attracted to dancing with Cunningham because you already thought that way too?

Dunn: That’s a tricky question. I took a ballet class when I was a student at Princeton, and I really liked it, but I never imagined being a dancer. I thought I would be an academic. When I got back to New York, someone said I should try Merce Cunningham because “he makes good movement for men.” So I went, and that first day I was entranced. I’d never seen a male dancer be so elegant without being a ballet dancer. And he didn’t have an elegant body, either. He had a slightly eccentric body, but he was dancing with elegance. And I thought that was such an interesting combination. Actually, I didn’t think it—I just felt it. I was immediately taken with that, and luckily he invited me into the company right when I was going to stop taking classes, and totally changed my life.

I agreed, intuitively, with so many of his choices. The kind of material, the attitude about dance—you just do it, you’re not precious about it, you don’t necessarily say what you do, you teach a class and you let all those phrases go, you don’t save them. This kind of Zen thing that he and John Cage had embraced, not in a big way, but on the edge of their rhetoric. He made stuff, and he just let it go. Wow! That was so different from the preciousness and sacred ground of Martha Graham. And that was very refreshing because I came from a manual work background with my father when I was young, into athletics, which I pursued with venom. And then I had to stop being physical when I went to Princeton because the studying was overwhelming. And then I took this ballet class and there was this convergence of my athletic interests and my art interests, but I didn’t want to be a ballet dancer. When I saw Merce, all of this came together.

So yes, I aligned with a lot of Merce’s attitudes and ways he worked. When he invited me into his company, the first thing he taught me was one of his parts. So there was clearly a mutual identification going on. It was a kind of convergence of our feelings. We didn’t talk about it, but the intuitive connection was very strong. And I don’t regret it. I don’t feel inadequate because I stayed with a lineage. I found my mentor. I never would have done any of this if I hadn’t met him.

That’s a beautiful thing about the modern dance world. You find what you connect with, and then you either stay with that, or you elaborate, or you go on with your own version of it.

Waldman: I was so fortunate growing up here in New York and being taken to Graham and the ballet by my mother—getting it from a pretty early age. Later I became close with Barbara Dilley, who came out to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa where I teach, so I knew some of the Merce world. It was already so much a part of the aesthetic of doing your own thing and being able to work in these parallel ways. And of course Cage and his writing was important to poets. I felt happy to see you continuing some of his methods with this next generation. I can’t comment on what’s going on in the dance world now. You seem to have some issues, I know, with the focus on politics and content, which isn’t what you’re interested in.

Dunn: No, I’m not. Interiority doesn’t interest me so much either. When Merce danced, there was an equanimity in his body and face. You’re not trying to express an emotion; you’re just doing it. That’s just like with my father. We just did the work. There’s a kind of pragmatism in formalistic dance that is very attractive to me.

I bring this up because I view dancing as a visual art. For me, if you focus only on what you feel inside, the visual aspect could be compromised.

Waldman: Well, I think there’s always something new to discover in your movement. What you put on people.

Dunn: When you work intuitively and formalistically, without an idea about what it’s supposed to mean or what you are supposed to feel, all kinds of new emotions come up. That’s what’s so exciting! And it’s not unemotional. It’s just not predictably, conventionally emotional. You dance, and people feel all sorts of stuff, including the dancers. It is open. It’s emotionally open.

Waldman: Poetry can be that way too.

Dunn: Yes! Yes.