Papa, don't preach

David Dorfman's Disavowal, running through Sunday at Danspace Project, is a sprawling mess--except when it isn't--and it's an understandably well-intentioned sprawling mess. Let's put it this way: Disavowal doesn't want to be just dance; it wants to be something on the order of a parlor game, a dance concert, a '70s encounter group and an after-performance community meeting all sort of wrapped into one unruly package that spills out well beyond its announced hour length.

The passionate Dorfman brought us the Weather Underground-haunted and rousing underground in 2006, and I do get why he'd want to create this new piece in the way that he did--"to make innovative, inclusive, entertaining, poetic, movement-based performance with a radically humanistic socio-political slant…viewed and experienced by all populations…to foster discussion, debate and change." I'm Black Caribbean, queer, pagan and artistic in America and decidely to the left of Barack Obama. I hear Dorfman erupting fiery social issues all over Disavowal--in the midst of some slam-bang dancing by an ensemble that even The New York Times will have to acknowledge as being remarkable--and splashing that hot lava all over everyone in attendance.

Some of these issues are societal or communal in nature, but they still come down to matters of interpersonal relationship, individual power or powerlessness, the pecking order in a hierarchy, mental manipulation, and the dangerous psychological unpredictability of leaders and of followers. Dorfman started out thinking about militant slavery abolitionist John Brown--who, today, FOX News would surely call a homegrown terrorist--and came to this. Somewhere in the middle of Dorfman's process, the specificity of Brown morphed into Disavowal, which is not so much about Brown as it seems to be about Dorfman and about, well, about people.

Dorfman does certain things very, very well. As was true in underground, his rambunctious but tightly-organized (not messy) group choreography conveys energy like nobody's business; you feel the coalescence and sweep of a movement, and I mean that in the political sense of the word, but feel free to take it in the more familiar sense, too. He and his dancers can instantaneously deal any card from the deck of emotions and often blur the escalating transition from one emotion to the next in a seriously scary way. That gives their one-to-one interactions street cred, the disturbing ring of the familiar.

Dorfman takes a big risk in pushing his audience around in the service of his intentions, and I can't say, in all honesty, that his methods worked well for me. From the moment I set foot inside St. Mark's Church, I was being told where to go, what group of people to sit with, what to do--for instance, I was made to join an in-progress card game that was totally new to me--when to stand up, when to clap along in rhythm. At one point late in the proceedings, after quite a bit of this, like a handful of other folks, I refused to budge. I was asked, with subtle condescension, "Do you need help?" If I had not been worn out from a long day, I might have snapped back, "What part of No don't you understand?"

I kind of get what Dorfman was doing, since his "character" in Disavowal--who seems to enjoy calling himself and being called "Papa"--is a lurching, volatile control freak who drills and mistreats the loving, sensitive, pliable dancers in his charge. The audience gets a relatively small taste of what it's like to be in a space created and ruled by this over-inflated balloon of a man, this Papa.

So dominating is he, that the Katrina flood of his arbitrary whims--set in motion by his surrogates, his performers--rages past the performance space onto the risers where we, innocent bystanders, have long attempted to disavow our connection to whatever it is we're staring at. Okay, David, I get it.

But while I get the strategy, I found its execution awkward, overblown, increasingly predictable and tiresome as well as literally tiring. It certainly didn't warm me to the idea of staying around an extra half-hour or so to discuss the issues raised by the work with the artists and my fellow sufferers…I mean, my fellow audience members.

But if Dorfman gets useful discussions out of this, if audience members are genuinely spurred to insight and change--as opposed to merely being triggered and irritated--well, then, good on him.

David Dorfman Dance in Disavowal at Danspace Project, now through Sunday, 8:30

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