Robert Ellis Dunn - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Robert Ellis Dunn was an American musician and choreographer who led classes in dance composition, contributing to the birth of the postmodern dance

Postmodern dance

Postmodern dance is a 20th century concert dance form. A reaction to the compositional and presentation constraints of modern dance, postmodern dance hailed the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocated novel methods of dance composition....

period in the early 1960s in New York City .

Early years

Dunn was born in Oklahoma where he toured the state early on in his career as a tap dancer. However, his first training in the arts was in music, and he studied music composition and theory at the New England Conservatory. From 1955 to 1958 he studied dance at the Boston Conservatory of Music and taught percussion for the dancers of the conservatory. The Boston Conservatory is where Dunn first began working with Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham

Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...

Career

Robert Dunn first collaborated with Merce Cunningham in performances in Boston and New York City in 1958. He soon moved to New York, where he worked as a piano accompanist at the Cunningham Studio. Dunn had attended some of John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

’s seminars on composition at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and Cage encouraged Dunn to continue these classes, which were first taught at the Cunningham Studio. Dunn applied many of Cage’s principles regarding music to his movement classes . Dunn’s students included musicians, visual artists, and dancers such as Simone Forti

Simone Forti

Simone Forti , a postmodern American choreographer and musician, was born in Italy but moved to the United States at a young age. Throughout her career she became known for a style of dancing and choreography that was largely based on basic everyday movements, such as games and children's...

, David Gordon, Steve Paxton

Steve Paxton

Steve Paxton is an experimental dancer and choreographer. His early background was in gymnastics while his later training included three years with Merce Cunningham and a year with José Limón. As a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, he performed works by Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown...

, Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk

Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...

, Lucinda Childs

Lucinda Childs

Lucinda Childs is an American postmodern dancer/choreographer. Her compositions are known for their minimalistic movements yet complex transitions. Childs is most famous for being able to turn the slightest movements into an intricate choreographic masterpiece...

, Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.- Early life :...

and Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown is a postmodernist American choreographer and dancer.Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and received a B.A. degree in dance from Mills College in 1958. Brown later received a D.F.A. from Bates College in 2000. For several summers she studied with Louis Horst at the American Dance...

.

In July 1962, the class performed their work at the Judson Memorial Church

Judson Memorial Church

The Judson Memorial Church is located on Washington Square South between Thompson and Sullivan Streets, opposite Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of the Manhattan borough of New York City...

. This performance is widely considered the beginning of a new era in modern dance that was based on non-traditional methods of approaching choreography and performance, specifically regarding the use of improvisation . Dunn went on to teach at many professional schools and universities, including Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

and University of Maryland, College Park

University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...

. Dunn also served as an assistant curator at the Research Dance Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center from 1965 to 1972. He continued teaching at University of Maryland College Park until recent years. Dunn also became interested in dance for camera, or “videodance,” in which an installation was created with Matthew Chernov and premiered t the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee on January 30, 1997, after his death. Robert Dunn died of heart failure in New Carrollton, Maryland on July 5, 1996. He was 67 years old .

Philosophy

Dunn appreciated John Cage’s non-judgmental approach to teaching, and analyzed structure, form, method, and materials over praise or criticism of a work. Dunn pushed students to experiment with phrasing, technique, musicality, and logic in order to develop a new style of dance. Dunn also encouraged his students to create writing that defined the parameters of the dance. Movements were created out of improvisation, and many variables could change the movement. Timing was sometimes cued by the changing signal of a traffic light outside the studio window . The 1962 performance of these classes in the Judson Memorial Church marked a historic moment: the beginning of postmodern dance . Dunn’s experiments with music, movement, and surrounding elements greatly influenced many post-modern dancers including Steve Paxton, father of contact improvisation. Later in life, Dunn became interested in videodance, which he felt exposed dance to those who do not seek it out and gave the choreographer the ability to draw attention to certain details of a piece . While Dunn had distinct ideas regarding composition, he did not wish to define or codify a style of movement, and insisted on his work always being seen as an evolving process rather than proven theory

Honors and awards

Dunn was given a ‘Bessie’ New York Dance and Performance Award in 1985. He also was awarded the American Dance Guild Award in 1988, and had a scholarship named after him at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in 1993. His videodance collaboration “DanceFindings: Robert Ellis Dunn Videodance Installation” with Matthew Chernov was on exhibit at the Haggerty Museum of Art in the winter of 1997 .

Quotations

Yvonne Rainer said to Dunn in a conversation printed in Artforum in December, 1972, "I don't remember that your teaching ever insisted on any one thing."

"For several years now, I have felt that the two greatest learning occasions of my life were provided by John Cage, my teacher of experimental music, in the late 50s and early 60s, and Irmgard Bartenieff, my teacher of movement analysis, in the early 70s. In each case the influence was so deep and pervasive that it is impossible to lift it out for objective examination." -Robert Dunn, Strathmore Museum

"I long ago became interested in this specific art form through frustration at the limitations of stage dance on video (no matter how welcome to dancers as documentation), as well as the limitations put upon the fantastic capabilities of video to present the incredible detail of dance and the human body." -Robert Dunn discussing videodance project.

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