David Gordon (choreographer) - 2000s and 2010s

2000s and 2010s

Other productions Gordon has created as writer, director and choreographer include Autobiography of a Liar (1999), FAMILY$DEATH@ART.COMedy (2001) – for which he received his third Bessie Award – and Private Lives of Dancers (2002), all originally presented at Danspace in New York. In 2000, he was commissioned by ACT to write an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, with music by Gina Leishman, which was called Some Kind of Wind in the Willows. This production was workshopped but was never produced. In that same year, he assembled and directed for White Oak a retrospective program of postmodern dance, Past/Forward, which included pieces by Gordon, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown.

In 2004, Gordon made Dancing Henry Five, which utilized William Walton's music for Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V, as well as dialogue from the film and recorded dramatic recitations of the text by Christopher Plummer and others. This production received an American Masterpiece Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Dance Program, and has been seen in New York, Minneapolis, Lawrence, Kansas, the University of Maryland, Lexington, Kentucky, and ODC in San Francisco. In 2011 it was revived and performed at Montclair State University in New Jersey, Columbia College in Chicago and the University of Albany, New York.

Gordon has also adapted, directed and choreographed a number of classic theatre works:

• Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs (2004, presented in London, Seattle and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City) – in which he and Setterfield played the Old Man and the Old Woman to a solo cello score composed by Michael Gordon (no relative);
• He Who Gets Slapped (2004, for Theatre for a New Audience in New York);
• Aristophanes' The Birds (2006, as Aristophanes in Birdonia);
• The Roundheads and the Pointheads by Bertholt Brecht with music by Hanns Eisler (2002–2009, as Uncivil Wars: Moving with Brecht and Eisler, commissioned by the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and The Kitchen in New York City), and also performed at Montclair State University.
• Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, plus two other short pieces by the writer, became the basis of Gordon's Beginning of the End of the..., which played for the month of June 2012 at the Joyce SoHo.

In October 2012, Gordon mounted for Danspace Project The Matter/2012: Art and Archive, based on his early work The Matter (1972/1979), and including versions of Mannequin (1962) and Chair (1974). The piece was part of the series Platform 2012: Judson Now, connected to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first Judson Dance Theater performances, and was called by the New York Times "a breathtaking evening of dance that pays homage to his early days."