Courtesy of Jun Yi He Wu ‘25
On Saturday, November 5, in Palmer Auditorium, the Connecticut College and New London communities came together to witness a heartwarming and tear-jerking evening of dance. David Dorfman Dance Company is a contemporary/post-modern dance company that aims to “de-stigmatize the notion of accessibility and interaction in post-modern dance by embracing audiences with visceral, meaningful dance, music and text”. This month, the company performed a work titled “(A) Way Out of My Body”. It is a piece that explores what it looks like and feels like to be “out of body”.
With the help of a mind blowing technical design, inspiring live musicians, and, of course, dancers who seemed to transcend space and time with their physicality, dynamics, joy, intensity, and breath, the work also explores themes such as life, death, and relationships. The moment the house lights went out at the beginning of the show you could feel the audience settle in their seats, but this calm was quickly disrupted by several flashes of yellow light that abruptly hit the audience.
When discussing performance art, we often talk about the stage as a whole miniature world in itself, but lighting the audience in this way brings the viewers into the world of the stage. We are invited, not to passively settle in our seats, but to be active viewers in the theater. What followed this surprising invitation was a moment of stillness. All six dancers—David Dorfman, Lisa Race, Nik Owens, Lily Gelfand, Claudia-Lynn Rightmire, and Diamond Laurant—took the dimly lit stage in their stark white, layered costumes, and assumed a position that we would see repeated at some point during the rest of the evening. They stayed in these poses for a while as a sliver of light trailed across the stage and their bodies, lighting just pieces of faces and limbs. As the show went on, these contrasting themes of intensity and stillness, seriousness and silliness, continued to emerge. In one moment, Dorfman is telling a story about his mother who had MS. While the story is serious and sad, the audience is still brought to laughter through witty and engaging storytelling.
David Dorfman is a Professor of Dance in Conn’s Dance Department. The company is the department’s company in residence and they often spend a couple of weeks a year choreographing their work and guest teaching classes at Conn. “(A)Way Out of My Body” was crafted in many different studios, but a lot of construction has been done on the work at Conn. In fact, the piece was actually first performed in 2020 at Conn in Myers Studio. Since then, lighting and casting and choreography have shifted, so it was exciting for the company to be able to perform a more mature version of the work this year.
The evening concluded with a Talk Back, where audience members had the opportunity to ask questions directly to the choreographer, dancers, and musicians. One audience member asked the cast to reflect on a moment in the dance in which they feel most at home, and the range of responses spoke to the range and complexity of the piece itself. For Lily Gelfand, who has been with the company since the beginning stages of this work, she feels most at home when she plays the cello on stage. Gelfand is a fierce and captivating dancer and performer, but she is also a talented cellist—a skill she shares with her father. Gelfand told the audience that she feels most at home in these moments because it makes her feel connected to music and her dad. For Claudia-Lynn Rightmire, home exists in moments of joy and silliness, “I feel at home when I get to laugh on stage with my friends,” she told the audience. Professor Lisa Race, who has been dancing with David Dorfman Dance for several decades, shared that she feels most at home during a solo she performs about her mom. The solo makes her feel close to her mom, and it used to have a somber feeling to it, but Race has recently been performing the solo with more lightness. “My mom wouldn’t want me to be so serious about it,” Race told the audience. This range of responses speaks to the emotional and artistic range of the work.
This could be one of the last times the company performs this work with the full technical production. “It’s bitter sweet,” Dorfman told me. While it is sad to put “(A)Way Out of My Body” to rest, the company is working on a new project that they are looking forward to expanding and learning from.
