Daughters of the Evening

In October 1942, within four days of one another, two Douglas Dunns entered the world—one in Scotland, one in California. Both grew up to be internationally admired artists. Literal poetry became the life’s work of Douglas Eaglesham Dunn, OBE; and the lines from his many collections are well worth looking up for the musicality and emotional candor of their expression and their command of meter and rhyming forms. The American Douglas Dunn has also enjoyed encounters with Pegasus: This Dunn has written poetry (in the open manner of Robert Creeley and other mid-century moderns) and collaborated on theatricals with poet Anne Waldman of the New York School. He has also slipped bits of poetic cunning (such as the title Lazy Madge, a rendering of the French phrase les images) into the dances and physical presentations for which he is admired in this country and in Europe as a representative of Postmodernism and a reliable surpriser. And he shares with the Scottish Douglas Dunn a continuing engagement with the myths of ancient Greece.

Performance

Douglas Dunn + Dancers: “Hesperides”

Place

Douglas Dunn Studio, New York, NY, April 25, 2026

Words

Mindy

Janet Charleston and Jin Ju Song-Begin in Douglas Dunn's “Hesperides.” Photograph by Jacob Burckhardt

However, although poetic logic may be the soul of the American Dunn’s artistic enterprise, the writing of actual poetry seems to be his side-hustle: His day-and-night-and-day-for-night job is dancing and the provision of opportunities for others to dance—that is, choreography and the production of dance-theater spectacles. In a 2018 contribution he made to the web site of the SoHo Broadway Initiative, he wrote:

By 1969 I had become a member of Merce Cunningham & Dance Company. My girlfriend and I heard about a loft opening up at 508 Broadway. Neither of us was doing our own choreography yet, so we did not really need the space. But while we were trying to decide, I had a dream. I was standing in the loft. The back wall was missing. In place of the buildings that are in waking life there, I saw the African savanna, teeming with animals. The vision was telling me that dancing was to be my life.

Dongri Suh (center) Janet Charleston and Kieran McBride (seated) in Douglas Dunn's “Hesperides.” Photograph by Jacob Burckhardt

The unexpected conjunction of images in the American Dunn’s story of his dream is more French than British, more Rimbeau than the Auden or Larkin who sometimes beckons from the phrasing of his Scottish namesake—perhaps one way to distinguish the imaginations of these doppelgängers manqués. I’ve also been able to follow some of the American’s career in person, having seen him dance with Merce Cunningham—a kind of West Coast Robert Redford, enchantingly individual in his earnest efforts to master technical exactitude while effortlessly accomplished in projecting a sense of drama. I saw him with his own company, founded in 1976, on film and live in various Downtown venues, where he has produced dance art that’s funny and tender (Arlene Croce once wrote of being moved by the touch of his bare feet on the floor in performance), or coolly abstracting, or disturbingly emotive (during the years when he experimented with extreme facial expressions). His engagement with literature as part of the sound score of his thickly populated dance works seems to me to have become both intensified and even more refined in the past several years. He frequently presents himself as an aging clown in a domino mask; however, few who have attended any production by this Douglas Dunn would miss the depth of his artistry or the high taste underlying his essentially seigneurial enterprise.

In “Garden Party,” his 2023 grand idyll of art and dancing, which he presented in his longtime loft at 541 Broadway, Dunn participated as a kind of mentor/amuser character (or series of characters) to a tribe of playful sophisticates. The Party’s hostessing muse was his dignified longstanding life partner, the dancer Grazia Della-Terza. And the designer of the flowering Earth in which their beauteous young world cavorted was the artist Mimi Gross, Dunn’s veteran collaborator par excellence. (The choreographer Catherine Tharin has written an outstanding account of this production online.)

This spring’s “Hesperides” (April 25 through May 2)—another loft spectacle with many of the same cast and crew—provided a kind of bookend to “Garden Party,” a companion piece about Dunn’s own interior. By my lights, it is the greater of the pair. Once again, he has gathered a team of collaborators who irradiate (the orchidaceous lighting is by Lauren Parrish) his company of exactingly trained dancers as they impersonate mythic creatures in sumptuously colored dance wear (David Quinn) and other evocative costumes, such as flower-edged tulle dresses.

cove barton (center), Janet Charleston, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Tim Ward, Dongri Suh in Douglas Dunn's “Hesperides.” Photograph by Jacob Burckhardt

The Hesperides of Greek myth were nymphs associated with the sunset who, in the company of a dragon, guarded the golden apples of the sun on the far West periphery of the world. Dunn has set these guardians—pairs of lovely women, all marvelous terpsichoreans—to dancing a barefoot movement language that continually transforms itself from the rigors of classic ballet’s fifth position and attitude poses to the softer power of Isadora Duncan’s magical skips that appear to sink and sail simultaneously. I didn’t spot the dragon at the performance I attended, but I may not have recognized which figure(s) was meant to embody it. The male-female couple clothed in autumnal-colored tunics and transparent plastic versions of the defensive skirts worn by Roman soldiers? The pair of strapping, nearly nude young men who practiced what looked to be yoga-derived maneuvers and high jumps in synch?

What was unmistakable was that all these personae were maintaining security within a set invented by a theatrical genius (costume and set design and all painted surfaces by artist Mimi Gross). Gross’s specialty with Dunn is metonymy: She devises minimalist scenic elements that translate in an onlooker’s mind to maximalist wholes. A horizontal border of painted leaves on paper along the top of a slightly curving wall, especially built for the production, prompts the audience to perceive a flowing canopy of trees in an airy grove. The painted flutes of a fragmented column recreate an ancient world. As “Hesperides” begins, Dunn appears in street clothes, from Ascot cap to his silvery, lace-up shoes, which look as soft as skin. Debussy’s “Syrinx” plays and Dunn mimes playing a recorder (substituting for a flute?)

Suddenly, projected on the wall, is a dream snowstorm, enrobing a garden with its luxe mantles as individual flakes continue to fly across the scene—the first of Jacob Burckhardt’s fantastical parade of “video window” designs. Filmed mostly in black and white (with a few marvelous color exceptions for flowering spring trees), they bring abundantly fertile living views of the four seasons into Dunn’s artifact of a golden preserve. They introduce time into myth, and the music and poetry of the sound scores reinforce the emotional transformations precipitated by the temporal changes of the imagery.

Douglas Dunn (Center), Dongri Suh and Janet Charleston in Douglas Dunn's “Hesperides.” Photograph by Jacob Burckhardt

In the course of some seventy-five minutes, we heard readers voicing excerpts of verses by Robert Desnos and, in a bitterly ruing mood, Constantine Cavafy, as well as poetry and prose by Sir Thomas Browne (from his Urn Burial), Sacheverell Sitwell, Robert Walser (the Swiss obsessive with walking), Clarice Lispector, Dunn himself (as a character named “Paul”), and the Palestinian-American scholar, essayist, and activist Edward Said (from his On Late Style). Their qualities of backward glances and senses of endings that fortify one’s appreciation of life’s wonder and richness as it disappears are exquisitely echoed in the evening’s poignant musical selections, which included Chopin waltzes and nocturnes (played by Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein), several pieces by Bach performed by Glenn Gould and others (among them, the Aria in G Major from The Goldberg Variations, played by the pianist Carol Rosenberger, who overcame paralytic polio to become a concertizing performer), and a Branle double as described in the 1588 Orchésographie of dance theorist and historian Thoinot Arbeau.

In conjunction with the costume and scenic designs, the lighting, and the beautiful videos, the meticulously assembled sound score of music and literature places the choreography in a stunning context, where the immortal Hesperides are perceived within the reality of a world where aging, regret, and death are ineluctable. The dancing of Dunn and Della-Terza, in a duet, was a gentle paean to the erasures of time: Mostly slow stepping and gravely executed, enigmatic gestures, they connected with many of us in the audience, who also walked with some caution if not with mechanical assistance.

In contrast was the youthful dancing of the rest of the cast, who ranged downward in age from Janet Charleston (a member of Douglas Dunn + Dancers since 1993 and so adept in her solo that, unless you had read her bio online, you wouldn’t be likely to guess how many years separate her from her younger colleagues). Kieran McBride, listed as an understudy, was so strong and stylish in her solo as a nymph, late in the work, that she seemed special even among this meritorious group. (Perhaps her gifts are familial? She is a niece of the New York City Ballet ballerina Patricia McBride.) Her variation was itself outstanding for its clarity of structure and delightfully unpredictable phrasing. I learned after the performance that McBride was dancing a solo Dunn had made in 1984, which she learned from a video. “Hesperides” has been in process for the past forty-two years! No wonder it seems so wise.

Dancers in the work who have not yet been mentioned were cove barton [cq], Alexandra Berger, Vanessa Knouse, Emily Pope, Deniz Sancak, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Dongri Suh, and Timothy Ward. Commendations to them all.

My only reservation concerns the props meant, I believe, to represent a couple of the golden apples. From where I sat, they looked not gold but fiery, and their shape seemed closer to that of red peppers. On the other hand, perhaps that was a wake-up call for me to get new glasses.

Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff's writings on the arts, dance a specialty, have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other periodicals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Her most recent books are Why Dance Matters (Yale) and Dance in America: A Reader's Anthology (Library of America).

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