The walk to Douglas Dunn + Dancers’ reprise of Garden Party (2023) at his Soho loft confronts me with what passes for performance in 2023. Two young bucks have positioned themselves outside the Prada store. Streaming from phones set on window sills, they blow chewing-gum bubbles, gesticulate animatedly, and prance in place, like a pair of street clowns. At the corner, a young beauty struts in a leather jacket and bra top. Naturally, a companion is filming her every move.
Against the backdrop of high-end stores and formerly low-rent artists’ spaces, everyone else gazes into the solipsistic abyss of their screens, hearting TikToks and Instagram posts, accepting hearts for their contributions to the roiling eddy of content. They’re performers performing for sure but of the weakest sort. They create digital solos for distracted, uninvested audiences who’ll scroll away in a second.
Stepping into Dunn’s space is like stepping decades back in time. The programs are two sheets of paper stapled together, and the seating is folding chairs with pillows for the overflow. We make the air conditioning ourselves with fans graciously provided. During the pre-performance buzz, a troubadour strums a guitar, and ensemble members test-drive a block or two of choreography. The audience skews older, so actual person-to-person conversations unfold. Youngsters – where are you? Get yourself to the theater, stat, to see the masters at work.
Chatting is good, but taking in the scenery by Mimi Gross is fun, too. Replete with objects not ordered in bulk from Amazon.com, the set suggests an all-hands-on-deck construction. A bank of garish pink and purple flowers stands tall off to one side. Across the way lays a slanting, yellow-painted wall adorned with stalks of leaf green. Assorted swirls and blobs in crayon-box colors of geranium, violet, and goldenrod decorate the back wall. If you know the Mad Hatter, tell him you’ve found the place for his next tea party.
Dunn performed with Merce Cunningham before becoming a founding member of Grand Union, and these influences manifest as the soil from which Garden Party blooms. The intergenerational cast curves their backs over and away from crook-legged attitudes. With a leg aloft, they promenade, inching their way around an invisible clock. They développé and then hold the fruits of that labor – a leg extended to us like an olive branch – for long moments. My hips ache in commiseration, but they remain unfazed. I find a spirit animal for aging gracefully in the silver-ponytailed Janet Charleston, who manages these feats with regal bearing.
Other influences flit through the vignettes. Arranged in gender-neutral duos, the artists replicate the ornamentation of Baroque dance. Later, they dance as if Fred and Ginger, leaving space in their closed dance position for the Holy Ghost. At one point, a downstage line of dancers contract their pelvises and arc a revolutionary fist skyward; even Martha Graham has been invited to the soiree. More quotes, winks and nods appear, but I got so interested in being with the dance that they swam by without me recording them – sorry!
Dunn oversees the postmodern-minimalism-meets-romantic-maximalism vibe like a benign ringmaster, hanging out behind a semi-circle lectern. He pilots a stuffed bluebird through the air, bebops about, and stands unmovable, a gnome committed to his garden post. Forget about the lions and tigers, oh my, of a three-ringed spectacle. He’s a yarn spinner, organizing fairies and posies and butterflies and divine types into ever-changing tableaux where impulses spring into microplots. The artists often clump into three groups, as if channeling folk-tale logic. They also aggregate into a line of four against three or ebb away save a lone duet. Try to see it all, but a scampering triplet here or a flurry of cou de pieds there might direct your imagination down that rabbit hole only.
Wherever your eyes wander, they’ll land on something or someone. Look up and see the watercolors of light that shift kaleidoscopically across the ceiling. Look to the right or left and see the shadows that interplay with the set. Look outward and see how the dancers, regardless of being onstage or off, contrast a lightness of being with a sharpness of focus. Look inward and see how the soundscape of sentimental, mostly pre-21st-century music and recitations from Rainer Maria Rilke and Anne Waldman affect you.
Garden Party is everything all at once: lush (the prodigious sets), witty (the costumes with their tiny, removable tutus and fluorescent edging), technical (the exacting, academic choreography), sculptural (occasionally prone bodies, limbs arrayed like wilted petals), and ceremonial (the almost religious investigation into the eternal rhythms of life). Yet, it fulfils the promise as advertised – a fantastical garden party to be enjoyed by the guests. I heart it.
