PORTRAIT OF A MODERN DANCE FAN: A Profile of Doug Post

By Aynsley Vandenbroucke

The gentle, white-haired man walks into my living room and immediately starts changing into a new t-shirt. He tells me he’s preparing for our interview. The t-shirt says, “Dance is not a matter of life or death. It’s much more important than that.”

Doug Post is not a dancer, choreographer, producer, curator, or critic. He is an audience member who attends five or six New York City modern dance performances a week. He volunteers, ushers, and finds member discounts, all so that he can see more. In a time of shrinking newspaper coverage and ever shrinking budgets, Doug Post is a human, loving champion of dance.

He lives an hour’s commute from New York in Bernardsville, New Jersey. This is Central Jersey near the place where the Interstates 287 and 78 cross paths. He lives with Anne, his wife of 37 years. His three grown children pursue their passions in towns across the U.S. He loves to talk about them, probably even more than about dance.

On the Monday night I speak with him, he has set his hopes for the week’s schedule. Tuesday will include running from a benefit for Pentacle, where he has recently started working, to a performance at Dixon Place. Saturday, he will see the Dumbo Dance Festival before meeting his wife in Manhattan to see the Estrogenius Festival. Sunday, he will make an hour-long journey once more for the Dumbo Dance Festival. A friend of mine has seen Doug’s folder in which he organizes all of the performances on his radar; our three-hour talk flows so smoothly, I forget to ask to see it.

Doug was born in 1946 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (home of the Little League World Series) and grew up as part of a big family in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. His father was a member of the clergy at St. Mark’s Episcopal, so he grew up on church music. Summer vacations with an aunt in Canada included attending the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Gilbert and Sullivan musicals played a prominent role in his life, too. He says that the arts, although important to his family, were “not shoved down his throat.” He rebelled against church music and loved rock and roll; he ended fights with his parents about the “noise” he was listening to by saying, “It isn’t noise, it’s called The Beatles!”

Doug tells me the dance t-shirt he is wearing was a gift from a fellow performance-goer. The two met when they had adjacent seats and subscriptions to the dance performance series at the McCarter Theater in Princeton. It turns out that, after 20 years, Doug and his wife gave away their series subscription this year. They did this because companies that were avant-garde in the beginning (Momix, Daniel Ezralow, David Parsons) are still being shown and the program is focusing more on folk dance and ballet companies. Ballet has never been Doug’s favorite; he has “always been a fan of modern, or what passed for modern along the way.”

As a computer operator in the late 1970s, Doug worked part-time days and part-time nights. The transition between days and nights often necessitated trying to stay awake during late-night hours. These hours were the times in which PBS showed dance performances. A videodance of Charles Atlas peaked his interest.

He began to see modern dance. He saw the Limon Company at the Central Jersey YMHA. He saw Pilobolus, Mark Morris. His children came along, making money and time harder to come by, but for a birthday in 1984 he asked Anne for tickets to see dance. He remembers the first time he went to this thing he had heard about called the Next Wave Festival at BAM. It was the day of the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake.

At BAM he saw Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He saw Pina Bausch. For the first couple of years, he went to a few of the Next Wave performances, but then “the bill kept getting more interesting, so I kept going for more.” He tells me about a performance with live animals at the newly acquired BAM Harvey Theater, then called The Majestic. That event closed early.

Doug trained as a computer programmer, working on mainframe computers. I learn that these ran businesses before the advent of the PC. They still run enormous operations like Social Security, but jobs for people working with them are scarce. Doug has worked as a computer operator and programmer, and as a supervisor at a start-up business. He recently worked with a tax preparer, a nice job that, during part of the year, left open more time for seeing performances. During his last job change, Doug started to think that his next career should be within the arts–a transition accelerated, earlier this year, when his employer shut down his business.

Doug has since worked with a number of small dance companies, helping with administration and booking. He also has a job at Pentacle, the performing arts service organization. At Pentacle, he works with contracts and fiscal administration as an office manager. There’s a possibility that this will become full-time.

In his free time and under the heading of DJP Artist Services, Doug compiles and emails an extensive list of dance performances, auditions, and opportunities once, and sometimes twice, a week. Anyone can send him information to be included in this newsletter and anyone can receive it. For free.

He explains that the newsletter got started, “because I was meeting people and collecting emails, and artists asked if I would mind sending notices out. It started to feel unfair to do it for some artists and not for others. So I started to think that this was a way to connect people. After I got over my shyness I was surprised at how welcoming people were to me. This became a thank you for that.”

Doug is looking for ways to improve and expand upon this service. He is trying to make the workload more manageable. He may link it with Pentacle in some way or build a website. He is also trying to encourage dancers and dance makers to be better promoters. He wonders, “What is it about dancers? They are not self-promoting people for the most part. It’s frustrating to find out people have performed and I didn’t know about it. I take it personally. I could have helped you build your audience if you’d let me know.”

This is what touches me so deeply about Doug Post. He takes it personally. In the midst of the vulnerable process of making art, it is enormously helpful for artists to feel that their work is meaningful to someone. Many young choreographers in this city have stories about Doug Post. He is often the first audience member we meet who is not a friend or a family member. He comes to every one of our performances and we begin to feel we’re special. Then we realize he has been to every performance, period. We know we are part of an entire community that this man supports.

Doug and I talk more about his dance promotion concerns. “There needs to be a way to develop not only the performers but the audience too,” he says. “Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown, they were their own audience 40 years ago. We haven’t progressed beyond that. Also, I go to the Joyce and the people there are my age. We’re not going to be here in 20 years. How does this young generation build a base?

“And why do sports have so many more fans than dance? Many dancers are as conditioned and attractive as athletes, there’s a similar grace and ability. Why can’t we sell dance the way we do sports? There is this idea from classical ballet and music traditions that performance is highbrow, elite, which doesn’t refer to Joe Six- Pack in a Giants game. But not everyone at a sports event is a Joe Six-Pack.”

I ask him what differentiates dance from the sports he loves. He laughs, “The lack of competition. The creativity that’s involved. Plays within sports are pretty similar. Dance performance, it can be anything. When I go to a performance I know I’m going to come away with something I liked. It might be one moment. There’s this happiness. Wow, that moment was worth being here for…. I feel very fortunate that I found this community and was accepted into it with my total outsider knowledge.”

As we finish up our evening together, I ask Doug what advice he would give to an outsider, a novice audience member at a modern dance performance. He says, “Come in with an open mind. Leave your preconceptions at the door. Be prepared for anything.”

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Aynsley Vandenbroucke is a choreographer and director of Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group. She lives in New York City and in the Catskill Mountains where she and her husband founded Mt. Tremper Arts, an arts center focusing on movement and photography. She met Doug Post at a performance three years ago. www.movementgroup.org