David Dorfman Dance.

David Dorfman Dance BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, NY November 14-18, 2006 Reviewed by Elizabeth Zimmer

Chicago-born David Dorfman, now 50, had a successful career as both a choreographer of community-driven events and a stand-up comedian/musician (the latter often with Dan Froot). He witnessed the actions of the Weather Underground, a splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society, which, in the late '60s, turned to violence against the U.S. government in reaction to the ongoing war in Vietnam.

Last fall he made underground, an hour-long work exploring the apparent apathy of contemporary youth facing the current war, in collaboration with Alex Timbers, a 27-year-old who directs the design-heavy theater company Les Freres Corbusier.

Dorfman played sports seriously before starting to dance and now looks rather like an over-the-hill shortstop. He marshaled his company of 10 sophisticated performers and supplemented them with another 30 people. Long before the house lights went down, he began working out onstage, apparently warming up his pitch, but in fact tossing imaginary hand grenades.

After a loud explosion, his core troupe entered, asking questions that appeared like supertitles on the back wall, a projection screen for Jacob Pinholster's trendy video designs. In Heather McArdle's post-grunge costumes the performers confronted their own apathy, swirling through the space, responding to the sort of queries that fuel late-night dormitory bull sessions and the art of Jenny Holzer. They threw glowing balls, which stuck on the wall and gleamed. They advanced and retreated, forming on the floor a graph of their political engagement. Powerful dancer Jennifer Nugent launched into a rationale for killing to stop war. The group, swelled with the mob of visitors, picked up a fallen comrade and urged him forward, moving from apathy to action.

The Democratic win in last fall's elections may have undercut the power of this piece, perhaps making many of us feel less agitated about the actions of our government. Dorfman's dancers gave their usual utterly committed performances. The young people in the crowd offered a standing ovation; we who have lived through both wars were more subdued. See www.daviddorfmandance.org.