Inventors

Featuring Christopher Williams and Douglas Dunn, Inventors is presented as part of the La MaMa Moves Dance Festival.

Christopher Williams is a dancer, choreographer, and puppeteer based in New York City. He received a BA in 1999 from Sarah Lawrence College where he studied choreography with the late Viola Farber and puppetry with Dan Hurlin. Christopher has also studied contemporary dance technique, most notably with Jeremy Nelson, Vicky Shick, Douglas Dunn, Rebecca Lazier, and at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio where he received 3 scholarships to join their professional training program. He is the recipient of grants from the Jim Henson Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and has been commissioned both as a guest artist at Princeton University in 2006 and through the Dream Music Puppetry Program through the HERE Artist Residency Program in 2004. He received a Bessie Schönberg Memorial Endowed Fellowship for a residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and has been awarded residencies at Dance New Amsterdam, Joyce SoHo, the White Oak Plantation, Yaddo, and The Yard. He currently serves on the Artist Advisory Board for the Danspace Project.

In 1971, Douglas Dunn began presenting his own work: solos, collaborative duets and group pieces that de-emphasized dancing and asked the question “what am I doing here on stage anyway?”. During this period, Dunn presented 101, a performance exhibit featuring four hours of stillness, for six days a week over seven weeks. He also completed two films: Mayonnaise: Part I, with Charles Atlas and one with Amy Greenfield, 101. In 1975, signaling a return to uninhibited dancing, Dunn presented the hour long solo Gestures in Red in New York City, and went on to tour the work in France, Canada and the United States. Douglas Dunn & Dancers formed in 1978 and was invited that year to perform at the Autumn Festival in Paris. In 1980 the Autumn Festival and The Paris Opera Ballet invited Dunn to choreograph Stravinsky’s full length Pulcinella as part of an homage to the composer. Most recently, in 2004, Dunn presented The Higgs at the Pinetum in Central Park, New York City.