{"id":563,"date":"2024-07-24T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-24T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/?p=563"},"modified":"2024-09-20T14:23:55","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T14:23:55","slug":"choreographer-david-dorfman-on-magical-risk-and-radical-empathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/2024\/07\/24\/choreographer-david-dorfman-on-magical-risk-and-radical-empathy\/","title":{"rendered":"Choreographer David Dorfman on Magical Risk and Radical Empathy"},"content":{"rendered":"

For 40 years, David Dorfman has made capacious work full of heart. His 2020 piece (A) Way<\/em> Out of My Body<\/em><\/a> features original text, songs by Lizzy de Lise, and the rousing music of a live \u201chouse band\u201d led by composer Sam Crawford. In a performance of the work last month in New York City\u2019s Bryant Park, Dorfman and his wife and colleague Lisa Race danced alongside the newest generation of company members. I had a unique view of Dorfman as he waited offstage for his entrance cue. A coil of electricity, he vibrated with small pulses as he held the railings on each side of the steps, ready to burst from the chute.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a little like that in an interview, as well. We spoke on Zoom recently in the leadup to his company\u2019s performances of (A) Way Out of My Body <\/em>at Jacob\u2019s Pillow (August 3\u20134)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jacob\u2019s Pillow bills you as \u201cbeing on a mission \u2018to get the whole world dancing.\u2019 \u201d Why is that important to you?<\/strong>
When you\u2019re dancing, you\u2019ve decided that you\u2019re going to interact peacefully, and, for the most part, you\u2019re going to enjoy it. When you\u2019re dancing with another person, or folk-dancing in a big group circle, or country line-dance, or disco dance\u2014that\u2019s how I started\u2014you\u2019re concentrating on being with other people, and realizing what your body is doing. You\u2019re not scheming power trips.<\/p>\n

The description for a workshop based on (A) Way Out of My Body<\/em> states: \u201cIn our unpredictable world, filled with daily obstacles of all kinds, how do we navigate toward positive change, resilience, and empathic behavior? Our answer is to dance through life with each other: safely and with magical risk appropriate for the occasion.\u201d I like that phrase, \u201cmagical risk.\u201d<\/strong>
Sometimes I talk about opposites being the same. Sometimes I say to choreography students, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you now do the exact opposite approach to this idea?\u201d One of the first things I showed my mentor, Daniel Nagrin<\/a>, he said, \u201cWhat a great idea! That doesn\u2019t work right now. Go back and make it work.\u201d He was excited about what I was working on, but it wasn\u2019t yet communicating. How could I release something that I thought was very important in order to get to something else that was more communicative?<\/p>\n

I think about this a lot. Also that opposites attract. It\u2019s kind of like when something really, really, ticks us off. Many times that\u2019s because we\u2019re really interested in it, or we see it as a side of ourselves that maybe we don\u2019t want to recognize. I feel that if we would recognize all of ourselves, we\u2019d be so much more empathetic, and so much more ready to see those sides in others, instead of saying, \u201cI don\u2019t like that\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t want to be near that.\u201d But really, what that means is that you don\u2019t want to be near yourself, and that leads to a lot of violence. It\u2019s our discomfort with ourselves. What if instead of going into relationships with one-upmanship, or the need to dominate\u2014what if we came as a listener and a witness and a facilitator?<\/p>\n

\"In
Dorfman and Race in (A) Way Out of My Body<\/i>. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy David Dorfman Dance.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That would be an extraordinary thing to learn in the dance studio\u2014or in social dancing.<\/strong>
I think surrender gets a really bad name because it feels like you\u2019ve lost. But what about yielding and surrendering and being vulnerable? In social dancing, leading and following can be really gender-specific. I think there are reasons that the man shouldn\u2019t lead all the time. I also think that the notion of following gets a bad rap. If you think of tango, it\u2019s not about a macho dominant male and a submissive female. Tango comes from two male-identifying people dancing on the docks of Buenos Aires. It is so complex and technically challenging, the follower almost needs to be ahead of the leader. They need to be ready for anything.<\/p>\n

What about those who feel intimidated by dancing with other people? What do you say to get them involved?<\/strong>
You can just be present, and to me that\u2019s a beautiful dance. Steve Paxton, who sadly died in February, would call that the small dance: the dance your body does when you\u2019re doing nothing. It\u2019s like: Look at all the effort we do to relax, or the effort we do to be present, and to be still and quiet and listening.

You work with people with differing ability levels\u2014high school and college students, professional dancers, your company, community members. Do you approach these groups differently?<\/strong>
I almost teach the same to anybody. Each time I do a workshop or a class, it\u2019s like the only class that I\u2019ll ever teach. It has to be the best hour and 15 minutes, or hour and a half, or two hours, because that\u2019s all that exists right now.<\/p>\n

I learn every student\u2019s name in every class. Some people might say, \u201cWhy does he spend so much time repeating names? We could be doing dancing stuff.\u201d I think that\u2019s just as important as the dancing stuff. That\u2019s where I feel that this idea of empathy, joy, and community come together. I think that it is kind of radical to make those priorities like learning names, doing a little bit of a chat, and spending time with safe touch\u2014those can be real priorities.<\/p>\n

What can the audience expect at Jacob\u2019s Pillow?<\/strong>
The last time we did (A) Way Out of My Body<\/em> at Connecticut College, it was very cathartic. One of the things I did was to have everyone in the audience introduce themselves to someone they hadn\u2019t met and also to say \u201cI see you.\u201d This was after the show, after, hopefully, a lot of what we had done washed over everyone.<\/p>\n

I really enjoyed that moment. Sometimes I wonder, is it too much? Should I do that? But usually I do it. I was in our backyard the very next day and our neighbor was outside with his young baby, and he said, \u201cDavid, I see you.\u201d I said, \u201cWhat?\u201d I knew he wasn\u2019t at the show. He said, \u201cYou were the subject of the sermon at church this morning.\u201d Then it made sense. Because there\u2019s this wonderful pastor who is a total arts supporter, and we\u2019ve had many conversations over the years. But I didn\u2019t know my neighbor went to her church.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m always saying it\u2019s great to convene in the theater\u2014that it\u2019s like a church, or a temple, or a mosque. And it\u2019s even greater when that spreads out beyond those walls.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The post Choreographer David Dorfman on Magical Risk and Radical Empathy<\/a> appeared first on Dance Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For 40 years, David Dorfman has made capacious work full of heart. His 2020 piece (A) Way Out of My<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":565,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":566,"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/566"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigrecipes.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}