David Gordon (July 14, 1936 – January 29, 2022) was an American dancer, choreographer, writer, and theatrical director prominent in the world of postmodern dance and performance. Based in New York City, Gordon's work has been seen in major performance venues across the United States, Europe, South America and Japan, and has appeared on television on PBS's Great Performances and Alive TV, and the BBC and Channel 4 in Great Britain.
Twice a Guggenheim Fellow (1981 and 1987), Gordon has been a panelist of the dance program panels of the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, and chairman of the former. He was a member of the Actors Studio, and was a founder of the Center for Creative Research.
Gordon was married to Valda Setterfield, a dancer and actress born in England, who was for 10 years a featured soloist with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. She appears regularly in Gordon's work, and has been referred to as his "muse". Together, they have been called "The Barrymores of postmodern dance." Their son, playwright, actor, and theatrical director Ain Gordon, has collaborated with Gordon on a number of projects.
Gordon's work has been archived in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Gordon also created a digital archive called Archiveography which covers both his personal and professional lives.
Style and process
Like most postmodernists in dance, Gordon employs pedestrian movement in his work, but he was notable for his frequent use of spoken dialogue, even in "dance" pieces, as well as his Brechtian rejection of illusion coupled with an interest in theatricality. He was quoted as saying "I [want] to use mundane means to a magical end." A contrarian by nature, Gordon creates works which are founded on structural clarity, which he then undercuts: "I always find some way to screw up a fabulously straightforward structure," Gordon has said, "I can't seem to avoid that."
Another of Gordon's hallmarks is his fondness for recycling previously used materials, both choreographic and physical. According to critic Arlene Croce: "Gordon is a collagist. Many of his dances and set pieces ... can be lifted out of context and combined with new material to make a new impression." This is particularly true with his use of gestures, which when seen in one context can appear meaningless or arbitrary, but which will pick up meaning and appear as deliberate when, for instance, accompanied by music or text. According to Gordon:
Movement is ambiguous until you place it against some background. ... I use a great many repetitions with variations to make the ambiguities of movement apparent. Exploring the alternate possible meanings of gesture is one of my major concerns.
Gordon's pieces frequently reference films and other aspects of popular culture, and are often autobiographical, or at least apparently so, with the distinction between true facts and fictionalized autobiography deliberately obscured. His pieces often employ humor, sometimes in self-deprecation, and he has been called one of the few "comic spirits" produced by the postmodern dance movement.
Gordon was very aware of the people who performed his works, and frequently tailored the pieces to the specific abilities of the dancers they were constructed on. He said "Dances may be glorious reverberating abstractions or eloquent high-class dance storytelling or thoughtful, emotion-provoking nonlinear narratives, but dancing, no matter what, always seems to be about the people who do it."
Later in life, Gordon was to say "I take on projects I don’t know how to do, and I relish the dangerous journey."
Early life and career
Gordon, a native of New York City, was born on July 14, 1936, to Samuel and Rose (Wunderlich) Gordon, both of whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He grew up on the Lower East Side and in Coney Island and graduated from Seward Park High School. Growing up, he saw movies in neighborhood theaters and vaudeville shows uptown and watched television, and these influences – such as Milton Berle on TV and Fanny Brice singing "Second Hand Rose" – later informed his first dance pieces.
After high school, he received a BFA from Brooklyn College, where he first studied English and then switched to art under painter Ad Reinhardt, took voice lessons to get rid of his Yiddish accent, and joined the modern dance club, and, at the insistence of a friend, auditioned for and got the lead role of the witch boy in the college's production of Dark of the Moon.