David Dorfman and his dance company here at Duke to perform Dorfman's new work, Disavowal, through Duke Performances led a lecture and demonstration during Professor Keval Khalsa's Modern Dance II class on Nov. 11.
Dorfman began by explaining some of the core principles at work in Disavowal an emphasis on the presence and absence of touch and the ways power ultimately isolates the powerful. With these ideas in mind, David then led the class and company through a variety of exercises that addressed these principles, exploring the ways bodies can intersect.
Dorfman and religion professor David Kyuman Kim, with whom Dorfman conceived of Disavowal, discussed the piece in relation to the contemporary moment, president-elect Obama, and the constantly shifting face of human interaction. Bodily motion and form, they argued, is literally transformed by even year-to-year shifts in social and political life. Kim, visiting from Connecticut College and a protégé of Dr. Cornell West, explained how he and Dorfman, starting with the story of abolitionist John Brown, built a piece that also addressed the process and effect of removing oneself from oneself.
The class closed by returning to the original exercises with Dorfman and company demonstrating the ways that those ideas of power and distance are translated within Disavowal.
Photo by Michael Zirkle