William Dunas

William Dunas was an innovative and visionary dancer and choreographer whose brilliance blazed through downtown New York in the early 1970’s. He grew up in Queens, New York. Dunas attended C.W. Post College and Brooklyn College where he studied theater, dance and art. Although he studied all three, he excelled in dance and is known as one of the outstanding avant-garde dancers and choreographers of his time.

He choreographed a powerful five-minute solo called Gap, to Penderecki’s almost unbearable “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” and used it in his first nine pieces between 1968 and ’71. His works had titles like X, Express, Wail, Wax, Job, Bojo, Bad, The Rite, The Trip, The Site, From Fool to Hanged Man, The King Is Dead, The Time of Your Life, The All the Same Faces Affair, To Love Us Is to Pay Us, The Children’s Crusade, Go Directly to Jail Do Not Pass Go, I Went With Him and She Came with Me, They Saw the Marching Band Go ’Round the Grand Stand, The Kids at Four, The Great Birthday Party & Exercises for the Rocker, The Trust Five Quartets An American Landscape. When he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972, at only 23 years of age, he was one of the youngest artists ever to receive one. Dunas continued to make eight pieces the following year. [1] Two years later, he worked with Ray Kelly at Artpark to create Rainbow Sculpture.

Dance Magazine has described Dunas’ techniques as being:

So intense as to seem brutal, and at the same time existential. In Ajax, he climbed a rope like a man desperate to escape some real or imagined terror. In A Poor Fool, he took a whole hour to shuffle across the front of the stage. In Our Lady of Late, he performed to a recording of songs by Meredith Monk while she rubbed the rims of crystal glasses. He transformed himself from piece to piece, sometimes appearing thin with a mop of curly blond hair, and at other times heavy and staunch with a crew cut. As a performer, he was never less than mesmerizing.”

Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice called him “the most single-minded” of dancemakers around that time. She also wrote, “[His] loneliness was so immense that he could be either the last man on earth or the first man in space.” Marcia B. Siegel, writing in The New York Times, wrote “he does practically nothing, and that leaves more for us to see.”

Dunas passed away in the spring of 2009.

[1] https://www.dancemagazine.com/william-dunas-1947aeur-2009/