Douglas Dunn
Shame at looking with pleasure at shape, colore, moves, without demanding
to know sense; shame that I would invite significance to obtund the sen-
sational intensity of immediate perception.
Shame at being an older dancer; shame at being ashamed of being an older dancer.
Shame that I have become focused on what’s interesting more than on what’s true,
the latter evasive, changeable, the former less abstract, always present; shame at
hubris of presuming to see beneath the actual.
Shame at my reluctance to believe in art as artifice only (imagine my success!);
shame that I ever left California fields for New York City stages.
Shame that I don’t accept what is; shame that I accept what is.
Shame that I am not accepting gracefully no longer dancing youthfully; shame
that I did not appreciate the adjustment to old age that adults around me when
I was young had the dignity to disguise.
Shame that my dancing is impotent to right wrongs; shame that I would consider
that it could or should.
Shame to believe I dance by my own strength and will; shame not to credit my
role in the play.
Shame at caring what others feel about my dancing; shame that I would prefer
not to care.
Shame at underestimating the value of inner conflicts, sidestepping them by liv-
ing them out vicariously in societal forms of competition; shame at the result:
handling worldly conflicts inappropriately, including turning the other cheek in
cowardly escape.
© 2016 Douglas Dunn
PAJ 112 (2016), pag. 79–88.
doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00300
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Shame to upbraid choreographers for ugliness or sloth or aggression; they’re just
striving from intuition as am I, and don’t really know, nor should be obligated
to know, in some fixed rational way, what it is they are formulating; simply
offering, as they do, what comes up for what it’s worth; shame that I would
ignore my upset at dancing that diminishes or discards its a priori condition as
a visual medium, presenting instead limp limbs, testo, confessional tears, topical
content; departing, in large part or small, often by considering the experience
of the dancer or the choreographer over that of the viewer, from the immaculate
ecstasy that comes with daring exploration of the human body’s limited range
of rhythms and shapes; simplicity allowing room for honoring and giving range
to the dancer’s imminent radiance.
Shame when the next move involves consideration of approval; shame pretending
not to be disappointed when dancing unseen.
Shame that sometimes when improvising I tip the balance away from shape
toward kinetic momentum; space around me begins to disappear; as if I’ve con-
sumed it; it’s inside me; the context in which I was a figure swallowed up; now
I’m the whole world; gone the separation that allows for “I and thou”; shame that
my Libran nature keeps me from attempting and experiencing radical divagations
from classical proportionality.
Shame to dance forcing body beyond natural behavioral patterns; shame to
consider natural behavior patterns anything but kinesthetic habit developed
through repetition.
Shame that I presume to ask another to move in a prescribed way; shame that I
would forgo the opportunity to see what a consenting adult has to offer as glint
within my Terpsichorean celestial prism.
Shame if I want you to see my dancing in a certain way, as that could mean I’m
wanting you to be someone you might not be; shame if I allow fear of your judg-
ment to enervate my urge to excite your brain’s kinetically empathic neuronal web.
Shame to escape to an imagined infinite; shame to bank on present finitude as
security.
Shame, perhaps, at my trusting to studying dancing first and foremost from the
point of view of physical technique, leaving myriad other aspects to intuition and
blind faith; it’s that my love of the form was jump-started as a way to avoid other
kinds of human exchange; thus it never occurred to me to address rationally what
kind of interaction moving in front of others might be taken to be; it’s a sign, for
sure, that I cringe on behalf of Terpsichore when I see concerts generated from
80 PAJ 112
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conscious manipulation of ideas of performance; shame, Poi, at anything but
a hoped-for implicit innocence of honed moves in open space? wittily modest
dancing with no explicitly expressed desire for or expectation of response? sole
focus a dedicated penetration of opportunities available within the elements of
the medium itself, without consideration that the results will be seen? plus, after
the fact, paying as little attention as possible to positive or negative reactions?
Shame at how insignificant is best effort at making interesting beautiful dancing;
shame to consider not continuing doing so.
Shame at style: it’s exclusionary; shame at non-differentiating lazybones.
Shame that my inward turning tendencies lead to failure to secure sufficient work
for those who dance with me; shame that I would wish for more job offers as a
result of talking rather than just showing dancing.
Shame at allowing liking/not liking to get in the way of smart judgment; shame
at smart judgment obliterating liking/not liking.
Shame at highlighting dancing while permitting mundane tasks of living to push
minute-to-minute gratefulness for existence into background; shame at making
these distinctions.
Shame at doubting what Terpsichore offers; shame at attempting to seduce from
her more than she vouchsafes.
Shame to be modest from fear of, rather than from respect for, others’ sensibili-
ties; shame not to imagine sensibilities beyond those I imagine.
Shame at on occasion ignoring things and people around me while speculating on
the reality of reality; shame at reluctance to follow suggestion offered by mind’s
reflexivity that it might be able to fool itself into knowing more than it already
knows . . . of itself . . . of something else.
Shame at temptation to treat dance as a subject of study; art begetting art; the push
toward “understanding,” with the goal of coherent momentum of taste resulting
in culture, a commodity able to be packaged, advertised, distributed and sold
to the as yet aesthetically uninterested (“After all, it’s good for them, and if con-
vinced they will pay, thus improving the economy”) as well as to the insatiably
interested; shame if, giving into this temptation, I were to abandon as primary
inspiration observation of the world apart from its previous representations.
Shame that I don’t want dancers to appear on stage as regular folks; but then I
don’t want to read novels with McDonald’s in them, either.
DUNN / Aidos 81
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Shame when radical dances disrupt communal rapport; shame when ingratiating
dances generate low-rent consensus.
Shame on those who never told me that the path to honesty is through mental/
emotional acceptance and daily re-acceptance of the body; shame to cozen myself
with credit for an MO arrived at through necessity.
Shame at useless aesthetic excrescence; shame at all-consuming utility.
Shame when emotions don’t fit external circumstance: shame when emotions fit
external circumstance oh so neatly.
Shame just to dance when there is so much to say; shame to downplay the upshot
of the unsaid.
Shame when glad surrender to the will of moves themselves is missing; shame
at mortification when good yielding is not selfsame in kind and degree with
another in the same dance.
Shame that my dance, striving for crystalline purity, is not our cultural main-
stream; shame if successfully realized aesthetic idealism is as damaging as some
successfully realized political fix-it-all policy.
Shame at not understanding how my dancing embodies, if it does, a poststruc-
tural aesthetic; if it does not, shame on Critical Theorists for not explaining to
me in what ways the work is ideologically retrograde.
Shame at not having resisted western MO of aesthetically productive self-exam-
ination; shame at forgetting temptations to vanity and frequent ineffectiveness
of attempts to contribute directly to the happiness of others.
Shame at slipping occasionally into operating as if mind is not embodied; shame
at my envy of people whose minds are so strong their bodies seem irrelevant.
Shame to agitate; shame to accept.
Shame, the human brain having evolved as a tool for survival, that I would
engage it on behalf of non-pragmatic gestures; shame that I have not developed
a convincing argument for the usefulness of aesthetically generated movement.
Shame that I’m back, as at the beginning, forty-five years ago, to simple geom-
etries on stage; shame not to trust what intuition offers.
82 PAJ 112
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Shame that I would exclude politics and other forms of content that might stimu-
late audience interest; shame that I would neglect the apprehension that form
itself carries moral weight via delight.
Shame that I chose dancing, the most material of art forms, to elaborate impres-
sions of unreality; shame that I don’t tremble in anticipation of thaumaturgic
sparks arcing across this body/spirit gap.
Shame at promulgating forms of kinetic idealism that have no chance of affecting
the overwhelming momentum of social processes; shame at doubting the value
of small beauties and the ability of many Americans to make use of divergent
initiatives, or at least to abide them without lethal retribution.
Shame to be a willing participant in The Modern Dance, an anti-tradition that
demands constant change amid a mad-dash culture that cries out for stability;
shame to contemplate denying myself the ironic pleasures of useless invention.
Shame at using dance as escape into a timeless present; shame at not having
learned to dwell within this disposition also in non-dance moments.
Shame if my dancing fails to transcend materiality; shame were I to elaborate
an idea-field that would presume to define what might constitute ethereality.
Shame at the urge to detach from the virtues and perfidies of fellow human earth
dwellers; shame at the dishonesty and fustiness of conforming to consensual
concerns to avoid rocking the boat.
Shame at the desire to be different; shame for any day I don’t strive for excellence.
Shame to dance; shame to be still.
Shame that only understatement takes my breath away.
Shame that its being labor-intensive locates refined dancing in a financially strati-
fied environment; shame to oppress kinetic questing because of the ways doing
so fits or not current economic circumstances.
Shame at fear to approach madness as way to know fullness of human mind;
shame to consider ousting reason, a wondrous gift seemingly holding the key to
humans finding right place and proportion on earth and in the universe, Anche se
acting, oddly, just as often, as nemesis to such endeavors.
Shame to suppose there’s anything new under the sun; shame not to invent
beauty for our time.
DUNN / Aidos 83
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Shame that I have not done more to correct material social inequality; shame
that I would allow my sense of fairness to compromise my avid support for fully
realized individual expression and ambition toward excellence.
Shame to enlist classical elegance as a means to avoid feeling; shame to parade
feeling not wrought to readable form.
Shame on you if you take my day-to-day immediacy of dance activity and avid-
ity for invention as equivalent to business’s short-term profit-taking-thinking;
shame that I do not more often argue against such politicizing of the arena of
dance-making, where consenting adults work in pursuit of aesthetic innova-
tion within hierarchical structures and other arrangements anathema to radical
political correctness.
Shame at caring too much what others think; shame at caring too little what
others think.
Shame at having failed to become an active repository and expositor of aesthetic
and historical knowledge; shame at being timid in standing up for intuition,
imagination, impulse.
Shame that I feel sentimental toward species we kill off, as if any one of them
given our opportunistic brains would not just as quickly devastate the planet;
shame not to revere and protect each and every manifestation offered up miracu-
lously by a universe even our layered consciousness cannot comprehend.
Shame at expecting anyone to pause to watch me dance; shame at forgetting the
adventuresomeness of New Yorkers, at least a few of whom will sally forth to
eye no matter what.
Shame at not finding a way to dance a political statement without compromising
formal values; shame at not taking the time to research and develop verbally the
point of view that defends formalist art as potently political.
Given the baseline twofold attitude toward art in the USA—one, that it is irrel-
evant to our pragmatic ethos, two, more emblematic, that it is out to hoodwink
us—shame that I am not willing to urge the a priori directness of dancing in the
direction of sincerity, a much used aesthetic trope that plays at outrunning the
artifice of art, and does indeed, in certain hands, at times succeed in wooing a
credulous viewer into ecstasies of false security and gratuitous acclaim; shame
that though human nature historically speaking advises against doing so, I still
look offstage for signs of good faith in others.
84 PAJ 112
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Shame to demand of an object or a person or a moment more than it offers;
shame not to make hay from the pith of this disparity between certain desires
and the evident impossibility of their fulfillment.
Shame to be convinced that dancing for its own sake adds to the good; shame
to be convinced that dancing for its own sake adds not to the good.
Shame that my dances refer first and foremost to themselves; shame that they
refer at all.
Shame that it must be the case, given how I behave, that I take the aesthetic as
more important than, or as some sort of substitute for, the political; shame that
in the sixties I considered them identical.
Shame to talk; shame to be silent.
Shame that I dance without considering the aesthetic and entertainment needs
of others; shame at the suggestion that I would presume to know what those
needs are.
Shame at dancing’s lack of utility; shame at comprehensive unabashed efficacy.
Shame that I don’t forgive us humans for the once seemingly necessary and
defensible but by now unconscionable mishandling of the planet, its flora and
its other fauna; shame that I don’t feel deeply enough the obvious: that this
corruptive domination is of self, is slow motion suicide, the ultimate biting of
the hand that feeds.
Shame naively ever to imagine that dances of artifice might advance a progressive
agenda; shame that, having noticed powers greater than Terpsichore’s reducing
even her best steps to nothing more than opiate entertainment, I continue.
Shame that dancing as generous giving is dogged by an urge toward heroism;
shame that valiance has been highlighted as negative because of knavish versions
within patriarchy.
Shame that as I undergo shattering of consciousness with each new piece, I can-
not help wishing viewers to experience comparable fracturing; shame to presume
that a spectator might consider a psychokinetic paroxysm edifying.
Shame at not increasing performance opportunities for the dancers by advertis-
ing to the hilt what the dancing is and why everyone should see it; shame at
considering compromising potential surprise by giving away in advance any iota
of the substance of the work.
DUNN / Aidos 85
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Shame that I fear being artistically ignored because I am a white heterosexual
male dancer; shame that I fear being artistically endorsed because I am a white
heterosexual male dancer.
Shame how rarely the desire to love and the desire to be loved burn with equal
heat to produce a dance aesthetically perfectly counterpoised.
Shame at every negative emotion; shame at squelching any source of psychic
energy, human mind able when rightly honed to channel all sorts of primal
forces toward the good.
Shame at expending so much life force on impotent artistic adventures; shame
to deign to decide what life force might be for.
Shame at being a member of the ever-seeking-to-be-new Modern Dance when
most people need and want things to be the same; shame at forgetting momen-
tarily that we proceed if at all by imagination.
Shame if my dancing ever were to arrive completely to believing in itself; shame
not to be striving daily for such belief.
Shame that I insist on a dance language that does not translate to reason and
verbal consciousness; shame that I don’t go all the way and cease to speak.
Shame to put the experience of the dancer first; shame to put the experience of
the viewer first.
Shame at going for attention by pretending not to want any; shame at wanting any.
Shame that while Rembrandt expanded his interest to include slabs of meat and
wrinkled elders, I remain committed to youthful beauties, with the excuse of their
facility in articulating ample variety of moves; shame were I to alter my dedication
to clarity and crux for the sake of necessary and favorable social transformations.
Shame to behave as if the disintegrative body could personify the infinite lumi-
nescence of mind; shame . . . I forgot . . . they’re inseparable.
Shame at presenting dances I love rather than dances everyone might love; shame
at positing an “everyone,” and to boot charging her with paucity of curiosity.
Shame that I wish my dancing to be able to satisfy my desire to be oddball as
well as my desire roundly to be loved; shame to assume that the two are neces-
sarily incompatible; but if they are not, would their coincidence dissipate an
energy source? If the motive to work is based on consistent reaffirmation of lack
of success . . .
86 PAJ 112
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Shame that I allow my desires to influence my interpretation of reality; shame
were I to prune what blossoms my needs do grow.
Shame that I allowed for a long time an imbibed middle-class promise of immor-
tality to keep me innocently complacent and misguidedly happy day-to-day;
shame that I would impugn my parents’ well-meaning and successful mission
to provide a secure nest for us fledglings.
Shame at how limited my work is; shame at sitting here writing when I could be
in the studio pushing the limits.
Shame that I cannot rationally justify the intuition that more truth inheres in
stylization than in realism; shame at my reluctance to attempt to spell out why
to me the obvious beauty of everything is not auspiciously transferred to the
stage without hearty doses of stylization.
Shame at “self-expression,” and any use of consciousness other than clearly to
perceive outer reality; shame to pretend to recognize anything but own mind.
Shame at questionable value of organizing a perfect niche world unaccountable
to the bigger real world; shame at anger when the big real world gets in the way
of the little niche world.
Shame at my dedication to highly stylized non-narrative dancing, putting the
work out of reach for those who prefer performance built on tropes of topicality
and notions of humanity associated with the untrained body enacting mundane
behavior; shame that I would denigrate the heroism, no matter how attenuated,
of aesthetically motivated extreme physical challenge.
Shame to decorate dissatisfaction with a patina of optimism; shame to brandish
the albatross.
Shame at preposterousness of proposing anything new in art or otherwise; shame
at denying each moment’s potential for revelation.
Shame at not retaining dancerly slenderness of youthful body; shame to suggest
that Terpsichore’s values do not exceed anatomy.
Shame at being unable to censor certain thoughts more suited to viewer than
doer: There are no principles of choreography separate from dances. There are no axioms
to teach, only conventions to observe. There are, it follows, no good or bad dances. Che cosa
we have, instead, are arrangements of bodies, of greater or lesser interest, at one time or
another, to various individuals and groups; shame at impulse to limit conversation.
DUNN / Aidos 87
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Shame that for years I acted in such a way, intentionally and I believe successfully,
that made it difficult for people in positions to help me to have access to anything
but the aesthetics of the work itself; shame that now I’m ready to remove the
straitjacket in order to garner more opportunities for the Company to perform.
Shame at acting out anger arising from shame; shame at hiding shame.
Aimlessly wandering the internet, I came across Aidos, the Greek goddess of
shame. Bang, like an explosion, my mind turned inside out. Suddenly, all my
behavior, artistic and otherwise, and that of others, pure, seemed pretense, fake . . .
as if there existed another, truer world we could be inhabiting, but inexplicably
and perversely we aggressively deny and avoid it. I wanted immediately to work
from this inversion. Tuttavia, because my sense of how bodies come alive on
stage precludes exposition of idea and suggestion of narrative, the dance, Quale
premiered at BAM Fisher in February 2015, took its shape as usual from my sense
of the dancers’ potential for visual dynamics and textural variety. On the other
hand, when I asked myself to respond verbally to these importunate insinuations
of radical mortification, words came rolling out. All pressing thoughts shaped
themselves readily into a poor man’s compendium of original sin. The account
includes greater acknowledgement than heretofore at how intractable are the
matters I care about most . . . thus the text’s frequent neutralizations by way of
counterpoised assertions, leavened with an implicit, newfound acceptance of such
either/or irresolutions. Thankfully, the writing did not compromise the dance, any
more than it directly enhanced or explained it, so that my perennial preference
for the discrete integrity of media, especially the salutary church-and-state-like
separation between talking and dancing, once again held sway.
DOUGLAS DUNN is a dancer and choreographer living and working in
New York City. Winner of many awards and commissions, he recently
presented Ruins at 92Y in Manhattan.
88 PAJ 112
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