Since its founding in 1987, David Dorfman Dance (DDD) has performed extensively throughout North and South America, Great Britain, Europe, and Central Asia most recently in Greece, Tajikistan, Turkey, Armenia, Russia and Poland. DDD has regularly performed in New York City at major venues, including The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, Danspace Project/St. Mark’s Church,
La Mama Theater, The Duke on 42nd Street, and the 92ndSt. “Y”/Harkness Dance Festival. David Dorfman, the company’s dancers, and DDD’s artistic collaborators have been honored with eight New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards, and DDD is thrilled to return to BDF for its fifth performance over the last 20 plus years. DDD promotes the appreciation and critical understanding of dance by realizing the creation of new works by choreographer David Dorfman and his artistic collaborators. In advocating his mission “to get the whole world dancing,” Dorfman’s work has enjoyed broad and diverse audiences nationally and internationally. DDD creates dance that seeks to de-stigmatize the notion of accessibility and interaction in post-modern dance by embracing audiences with visceral, meaningful dance, music and text. By sustaining a vision to create innovative, inclusive, movement-based performance that is radically humanistic, DDD maintains a core commitment to examine and unearth issues and ideas that enliven, incite, and excite audiences in dialogue and debate about social change and a myriad of other topics. Come, and Back Again, DDD’s last evening-length work, is an elegiac exploration of the virtuosity of daily life, vulnerability, mortality, and all the junk we keep or discard. Driven by the charged poetry and unapologetic, raw ferocity of the underground 90’s Atlanta band “Smoke,” five dancers and a band of musicians embark on a kinetic anthem of reckless personal abandon - taking on time, and how memory influences and manages our slippery, elastic existence. Come, and Back Again was commissioned by and had its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s prestigious Next Wave Festival in October 2013. CABA appeared at BDF in 2014 and is now part of the Company’s touring repertoire. Other recent creative projects include: Prophets of Funk (BDF 2011) which is also touring; Disavowal (inspired by radical abolitionist John Brown); underground (inspired by The Weather Underground, BDF 2007); Older Testaments (2005, set to music by composer/trumpeter Frank London of The Klezmatics); Lightbulb Theory (2004, original commissioned score by Michael Wall); Impending Joy (2004, original commissioned score by Chris Peck); and See Level (2003, original commissioned score by Chris Peck and visual design by Samuel Topiary). DDD is Company-in-Residence at Connecticut College, has its own Summer Intensive at the college, a Winter Intensive at Gibney Dance in NYC, and appears annually at the Tisch School of the Arts Summer Dance Residency Program at NYU. DDD remounted Lightbulb Theory and Impending Joy as part DanceMotion USA, a program of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and toured Turkey, Tajikistan, and Armenia in April/May of 2014. In July/August 2014 at BDF as part of DanceMotion USA’s US-based residency, DDD collaborated with Korhan Basaran and a company of rising stars of Istanbul and Armenia’s growing contemporary dance scene to create UNSETTLED, an evening-length meditation on reconciliation which premiered to sold-out houses at BAM’s Fishman Space in August 2014, and toured Armenia and Turkey in Spring 2015. For over twenty-five years, DDD has effectively engaged audiences worldwide, with community-based projects playing an important role, particularly in the 1990’s. In Out of Season (The Athletes Project) and Familiar Movements (The Family Project), the members of the company rehearsed and performed with groups of volunteer athletes or family members selected in the communities to which the company toured. In No Roles Barred, DDD examined the personal roles assumed, formed and interwoven in our modern social construct, engaging groups ranging from corporate executives and “at-risk” youths to college administrators, doctors, carpenters and social dance enthusiasts. The company’s three community projects have been presented over 30 times in 18 states and two foreign countries. In March 2016 DDD performed at the opening day of the Met Breuer Museum in New York City, dancing with live musicians throughout the day in the Sunken Garden. The company returned from a landmark tour to Athens, Greece in the summer of 2016, working with community athletes, dancers and mixed ability movers to animate the new Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center for their Metamorphosis Festival. After their tour abroad, DDD had a robust ten-day residency with Dancer’s Workshop in Wyoming, which included a showing of DDD’s newest work-in-progress, Aroundtown, as well as many classes and activities. DDD rounded out the summer with a performance at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum as part of the Cocktails at Cooper Hewitt series. This summer in addition to its usual action packed residencies at Connecticut College and NYU Tisch, DDD returned recently from Ohio U. Watch for us next summer in an Athens near you!
