Amid the rough-and-tumble movement, the seemingly spontaneous arguments and the air of danger and hostility that seeps into David Dorfman’s new Disavowal, there are also bracingly contemporary questions he is posing, and timely, potentially painful issues he is exploring. Dorfman, a feisty, bullet-headed presence as he weaves in, out and around the piece, is chairman of the dance department at Connecticut College, and clearly has been relishing the opportunities for discussion and interaction with a broad range of intellectuals that situation has offered him.
His recent dances spring from an urgent curiosity and an immersion with the realities of our 21st-century daily lives. They also embrace, even seek, a connection with the audience that bypasses the standard sit-there-and-watch-us arrangement. For Disavowal, audience members will be guided to specific seating areas and brought into direct contact with a specific company member with whom they are encouraged to identify. “We’re trying, in a pleasant way, to unearth the solidity with which you participate as an audience member. So we engage the audience from the very beginning,” Dorfman explains at St. Mark’s Church, just before a rehearsal. As he and his eight dancers developed the piece, they tried out various ways of connecting with audience members, to discover “would they feel more invested, would they have more of a stake in, literally, the safety of the dancers on stage?”
Among his Connecticut College colleagues, Dorfman often found himself having “endless conversations” with David Kyuman Kim director of the school’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. It was Kim who suggested John Brown, the controversial and inflammatory abolitionist. “He felt that John Brown had done this violent and crazy thing, but he had disavowed his whiteness and privilege, and put it all on the table for abolition of slavery—for folks that were very different than he was.” Kim posited the question, “what do we disavow in our life?” and Dorfman’s dance —with scenes marked by anger, defiance, obedience and confrontation—evolved from there. “I took it almost as an internal dialectic: What parts of ourselves do we disavow? Not necessarily skin color, but a belief system. We’re also intimating at applications of that kind of physical aggression where it can lead to rifts that can’t be closed easily.”
Among the movement motifs Dorfman developed is the “disavowal phrase,” which he describes as “separating yourself from the core of your body, as far as you can. How far can you separate a part of your body from your insides? How do we disavow ourselves from ourselves? That was one of the main impulses for the dance. I love the idea of physical metaphor—using these little cues, little aspects of physicality to guide an audience—sometimes into uncomfortable spaces, sometimes into ones that I think can be joyous ones.”
His vibrant, unaffected company members are a notably mixed-race group, and they are called upon to bring a good deal of themselves into the piece. “As I always do, I’m working in collaboration, asking them to contribute and bringing their responses to this issue of control and race and privilege to the foreground. I have my opinions represented, but it’s not like I wrote the ‘script’ from the start.”
As for his own participation in the piece, which involves inciting, reciting as well as moving with his distinctively earthy, robust authority, he sometimes comes off as a heartless drill sergeant, other times as negotiator or sage. He explains he is blending three contrasting, complementary roles and purposes within his performance. Like Disavowal itself, his persona is complex and layered and guaranteed to get people thinking.
Disavowal
May 21 through 24, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th St. (at 2nd Ave.), 866-811-4111; 8:30, $22.
His recent dances spring from an urgent curiosity and an immersion with the realities of our 21st-century daily lives. They also embrace, even seek, a connection with the audience that bypasses the standard sit-there-and-watch-us arrangement. For Disavowal, audience members will be guided to specific seating areas and brought into direct contact with a specific company member with whom they are encouraged to identify. “We’re trying, in a pleasant way, to unearth the solidity with which you participate as an audience member. So we engage the audience from the very beginning,” Dorfman explains at St. Mark’s Church, just before a rehearsal. As he and his eight dancers developed the piece, they tried out various ways of connecting with audience members, to discover “would they feel more invested, would they have more of a stake in, literally, the safety of the dancers on stage?”
Among his Connecticut College colleagues, Dorfman often found himself having “endless conversations” with David Kyuman Kim director of the school’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. It was Kim who suggested John Brown, the controversial and inflammatory abolitionist. “He felt that John Brown had done this violent and crazy thing, but he had disavowed his whiteness and privilege, and put it all on the table for abolition of slavery—for folks that were very different than he was.” Kim posited the question, “what do we disavow in our life?” and Dorfman’s dance —with scenes marked by anger, defiance, obedience and confrontation—evolved from there. “I took it almost as an internal dialectic: What parts of ourselves do we disavow? Not necessarily skin color, but a belief system. We’re also intimating at applications of that kind of physical aggression where it can lead to rifts that can’t be closed easily.”
Among the movement motifs Dorfman developed is the “disavowal phrase,” which he describes as “separating yourself from the core of your body, as far as you can. How far can you separate a part of your body from your insides? How do we disavow ourselves from ourselves? That was one of the main impulses for the dance. I love the idea of physical metaphor—using these little cues, little aspects of physicality to guide an audience—sometimes into uncomfortable spaces, sometimes into ones that I think can be joyous ones.”
His vibrant, unaffected company members are a notably mixed-race group, and they are called upon to bring a good deal of themselves into the piece. “As I always do, I’m working in collaboration, asking them to contribute and bringing their responses to this issue of control and race and privilege to the foreground. I have my opinions represented, but it’s not like I wrote the ‘script’ from the start.”
As for his own participation in the piece, which involves inciting, reciting as well as moving with his distinctively earthy, robust authority, he sometimes comes off as a heartless drill sergeant, other times as negotiator or sage. He explains he is blending three contrasting, complementary roles and purposes within his performance. Like Disavowal itself, his persona is complex and layered and guaranteed to get people thinking.
Disavowal
May 21 through 24, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th St. (at 2nd Ave.), 866-811-4111; 8:30, $22.
