Dorfman's Luscious Threads and Treads

Author: Kate Prouty

When reviewing a modern dance piece, you're not supposed to award all of your praise to the dancers (I don't know who said this. It's just one of those insupportable rules). After all, it's the choreographer who decides what his dancers do. He is the puppet master, the mind and organization, behind the show.
Not to say that David Dorfman's choreography in David Dorfman Dance Friday night was not remarkable, because his movement was indeed innovative and his structuring of space was compelling, but to see these dancers move was — what's better than remarkable? — really remarkable.
The seven dancers who performed (including Dorfman) exhibited a range of movement quality varying from capoeira-like playing and tumbling to the arm pumping and finger flashing of an underground urban discotheque. Their movement was full and luscious: limbs reached longingly in space and spines bent with flexibility. The two unrelated pieces, "To Lie Tenderly" and "Subverse," were very athletic, nearly acrobatic at times, and demanded serious stamina and strength from dancers Jeanine Durning, Curt Haworth, Paul Matteson, Jennifer Nugent, Joseph Poulson and Abby Crain.
Playing an accordion and greeting guests in the lobby, Dorfman did look somewhat like a puppet master, or at least a circus ringmaster, with his tall sparkling boots and shimmering pink fabric cloaked around his shoulders. This introduction established a night of fantasy and mystery. These were dances about magic.
Dorfman said after the performance that he was interested in the fascination with magic, which is really just a showcasing of lies. Audiences marvel at magicians' sleights of hand, innocently lying to their eyes, and so Dorfman titled his first piece "To Lie Tenderly." His dance was not about deceit per se, but it was whimsical and unpredictable.
In "To Lie Tenderly" the company was dressed like a band of outer space royalty. Poulson donned a long, flowing cloak (not unlike a wizard's) and Nugent's jacket was cuffed in fur; all of their costumes bled rich, shimmering colors like currant, royal blue, gold and fuchsia. They were luscious yet entirely fanciful, somewhere between a court jester and a king.
The texture of the fabrics and the details of their creation — sequins and shiny, silver ball buttons — evoked a passion of costume designer Naoko Nagata: restoring 19th and 20th century clothing. These pieces combined the look of traditional lines with contemporary fabrics.
Stark, primarily white lighting grounded the eccentricity of the first piece's costumes. Likewise, the boundaries of the stage were delineated by sheer white fabric stretched taut between metal poles. The sheets were a softer alternative to chain link, but achieved the same enclosing effect.
"To Lie Tenderly" also had a huge multimedia component. There was a three-dimensional rectangle of stretched fabric rotating in the air like a restaurant sign. Video-recorded images were projected from the floor onto this "screen," as well as onto the wall behind the dancers.
The video was recorded both during the evening's performance and from previous rehearsals. By combining these films in real time, Dorfman played with the meaning of nostalgia and memory. After the performance he asked whether five minutes ago is the past and are we nostalgic about this recent past. The juxtaposition of seeing a dancer move and then seeing her movement projected from a recording also evoked the sense of how images lie: although accurate, they are not absolute representations of the reality of experience.
The combination of technology and metal poles created a mechanical atmosphere that, by contrast, deepened the intensity of the fanciful costumes.
Perhaps because Dorfman's choreographic ideas were more vague in "Subverse," Nagata's costume designs were simpler. Their effect, however, was no less remarkable. The dancers were more uniform, all wearing sheer, cream-colored flowing pants. Their tops, in browns, light blues and muted reds were colorful, yet minimal. The crisscrossing straps of the tops revealed the dancers' backs and arms, showing the specificity of their movement.
"Subverse," although related by a few steps to "To Lie Tenderly," took different emotions down different roads. Dorfman opened the piece with a story about the notion of language and how it can be interpreted differently by people.
Creating what Dorfman called a "subterranean disco," the dancers burst onto the stage with their arms pumping to the thick musical beat and overtook the solo figure. This was one way in which the dancers exhibited innovation in movement, as a disco has never been like this.
This scene led into much darker emotions and more ambiguous movements. Partners exchanged, from duets to solos to group unison pieces and sometimes dancers were singled out as outcasts (Poulson's pants were pulled down as he crumbled to the ground, and at one point all the dancers pointed and laughed at Durning). The dancers wrestled with each other, both helping and hurting their partners.
Throughout all of this, the idea of magic initially presented lost its whimsical nature and got grim. The pieces were not pessimistic, but they asked at what cost do we lie to ourselves and let ourselves be lied to. As people grow together and slowly grow apart, their memories of one another fade and are replaced by the rose-colored happiness of nostalgia. Like a picture hanging on a wall, or a video projected on a screen, nostalgia represents a feeling, a memory of a movement, but not an actual reality. The technical stength and grace of the dancers communicated the raw power of the present moment, which Dorfman showed can never be fully captured in a memory.