Robert Ellis Dunn

Robert Ellis Dunn (1928 – July 5, 1996) was an American musician and choreographer who led classes in dance composition, contributing to the birth of the postmodern dance 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. Dunn’s students included musicians, visual artists, and dancers such as Simone Forti, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. The 1962 performance of these classes in the Judson Memorial Church marked a historic moment: the beginning of postmodern dance. 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 a proven theory. 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 (LIMS) 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."

"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.