DAVID DORFMAN DANCE
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It seemed everyone in the theater, not just the friends and relatives of the 24 mostly young area athletes who performed Out of Season, liked this work: there’s something fresh, clean, and uncomplicated about athletics despite the not-so-noble competition and aggression. Dorfman doesn’t ignore these–the piece opens with audience plants loudly insisting “I could do that!” as they watch a guy in a handstand, and ends with the audience pelting Dorfman with Ping-Pong balls–but he also pays attention to the teamwork, the mutual concern. The piece is just plain fun, with its slight, nonthreatening aura of audience involvement, its pleasing mix of athletic moves, from break-dance spins to cheerleading pyramids, and Dorfman’s ludicrous costume: assorted protective gear, including one helmet on his head and a couple more strapped around his middle, one on each love handle.
But on a more serious level the dance fails. Each performer recites his or her name and sports activities aloud, then whispers three words: “scared, nervous, worried,” for example. Some of these three-word bits are just jokes–one man steps to the microphone carrying a woman and says, “heavy, heavy, heavy”–but most seem designed to communicate that athletes have emotional lives too. This we know already, however, and all too well. Consider the way U.S. television reporters hounded Oksana Baiul about her “feelings” after she won the gold medal. Certain images in Out of Season, especially those taken from wrestling, succinctly express the closeness, even the love, between athletes who seem to be trying to kill each other, but I think we know about this too. And a sequence in which performers hurdle others crouched on the floor raises issues of domination and possible harm to others that are beside the point when the hurdle is an inanimate object. Maybe it’s impossible to create a piece that’s truly about sports and truly satisfying as a dance: to sports fans at least, sports are about winning, which means numbers–two outs, man on third, top of the ninth in the final game of the World Series. An athlete’s movement may be briefly glorified by slowmotion television replays, but in itself that movement means nothing, to sports fans or dance enthusiasts.
Bull, a Chicago premiere, substitutes bullhorns for saxophones, but both pieces rely on obvious phallic associations, both explore getting and staying together. Bull, which has a lot of text where Horn has none, seems preoccupied with bullshit–the lukewarm way we analyze and verbalize our emotions almost as a substitute for the real thing. Where Horn takes for granted the strength of a relationship that breaks apart–the two men look like gladiators, bare-chested and wearing kilts–Bull shows the difficulty of establishing a relationship at all: here the two wear tuxes, suggesting less familiarity, a relationship in the making.
