Artistic inspiration can spark from unexpected and diverse sources. Just witness the new dance from David Dorfman Dance.

Animating ideas came from health issues, for a son and a mother; the turmoil surrounding the 2016 election; and the disorienting childhood sensation of feeling outside of your body.

David Dorfman, who is artistic director of David Dorfman Dance and is a longtime professor in the dance department at Connecticut College, says the entire creative team has “spent two years collecting material that has to do with how we see and feel our bodies — what we think is real, what we think is so potent and important, what we feel about intimacy.”

The result is “A(way) Out of My Body,” which the acclaimed and influential modern dance group will premiere during a trio of public performances at Conn College. DDD is company-in-residence at the school.

“A(way) Out of My Body” features a five-person cast, ranging in age from 20s to early 40s, echoing the idea of intergenerational dance. They are Lily Gelfund, Doug Gillespie, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Kellie Ann Lynch and Myssi Robinson. In addition, Dorfman and Lisa Race, the associate professor of dance at Conn College who is married to Dorfman, have solos.

During the development process, the dance artists collaborated on creating all the movement, and the musicians — a four-person band will play in the performances, consisting of Sam Crawford, Zeb Gould, Jeff Hudgins and Liz de Lise — discussed and wrote music for “A(way)’s” themes.

Dorfman says there has been more latitude and opportunity for the individuals in the company to express their notions of self here than in past dances.

“In this show, there is more text generated by the company and spoken by them that is personal to them — instead of going directly for the larger social concepts — this time. Our writing and moving prompts came from our relation to our bodies, and our health — defined in multiple ways,” says Dorfman, who serves as a sort of team leader/coach.

Interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider serves as the visual designer for the project, and Dorfman says, “The way that he’s giving a purposeful lack of stability to the stage is just really beautiful. It’s poetic.”

And, of course, that’s apt for a work that deals with, as the DDD publicity notes, the question of “Where do our minds and spirits travel when the weight of everyday life becomes an unbearable load to carry?”

Dorfman says that, in these perilous times, he wants not just to survive but to thrive and see how he can “help as many as people as possible thrive and love their lives — that’s what this piece is about.”

Feeling outside your body

Part of “A(way)’s” beginnings can be traced to this: When DDD was performing their work “Aroundtown” a couple of years ago and contemplating new projects, Dorfman, who was 62 at the time, recalls that his body was feeling strange.

“It just didn’t feel right. I think I was trying to push through and ignore. It wasn’t anything, thankfully, cancerous and serious in that way. But it was just things that weren’t functioning properly,” he says, declining to specify what the health issue was.

“I’m in good shape now, everything is fine. I had to go to the doctor, had my first operation … So I did have to really tend to it, but it also is this key moment where I felt ‘Do I know my body?’ And I think more importantly, what about our bodies, society, our hearts DON’T we know?”

It reminded him of sensations he had as a kid when he didn’t really know if he was on the planet.

“I know that sounds strange, but I think everyone — I think, anyway — has had some sensation of, I need to pinch myself. Sometimes that expression goes with ‘I was so happy I needed to pinch myself to make sure I was here,’” he says.

He remembers, as a boy, playing baseball in a field where he grew up outside of Chicago.

“I just loved being in this green area. Suddenly, I thought, am I a little puppet in someone else’s play? Am I really here? Can I just levitate up and be transported? Maybe it’s an act of imagination … but it really made an impression on me. And it didn’t stop there. It was many times,” he says, mentioning similar feelings when being in an airplane or on an amusement park ride.

The sense of feeling so scared that one might leave his or her body, he notes, can be exhilarating or freeing.

“If we’re not risking and we’re never frightened or we’re never exhilarated, then it seems kind of sad. That’s one of the things that dance and theater and music have always done for me. They have enabled me, facilitated a manner in which I can get so excited about things, I feel I’m somewhere else. I’m transported. It’s transcendent,” he says.

With all that in mind, he asked the DDD creative team if they were interested in exploring the idea of “things that are part imagined and part real, where we can delve into almost another dimension.”

They were very interested, and that was one of the major strands that led to what eventually became “A(way) Out of My Body.” Another element was the political era.

Political impact

DDD was in residence at Conn College around the 2016 election, which Dorfman recalls as “a very surprising, disturbing and sad political time.”

He remembers how anguished some of the young people were.

“I was anywhere from 20 to 40 years older than some of the company members, the poppa. My comforting words were ‘This too shall pass.’ And I’m not intending this to be hyperpolitical but just realistic from my point of view when we have folks of color, folks of different identities and sexual preferences, et cetera, that felt like ‘Oh, my gosh, my life is threatened right now, overnight, my life is threatened, my rights are threatened,’” he says.

He notes that it’s not just politics in the U.S. but around the world.

“That amping up of violence at every moment, every turn, began to feel to me like an out of body experience. Is this real? Are we actually so angry, frightened in the worst of ways, vengeful, that we need to harm, hurt and kill at every turn?” he says.

Resilience and memory

Woven into the piece, too, is a monologue that Dorfman first experimented with during a baccalaureate ceremony at Conn College years ago. It was about his mother, who had multiple sclerosis. She had what Dorfman calls “this almost Oliver Sacks-like moment of going beyond her body and beyond what we think medicine tells us … and had this momentary awakening out of her body. It gave her this freedom for just moments.”

Then the restriction came back to her body, almost as if she and her body remembered. Memory and resilience are things the team talked about a lot as they created “A(way).”

Dorfman says of dancing that monologue in “A(way),” “I am feeling health and illness at the same time, sometimes in different parts of my body, sometimes alternating temporally. I feel it a privilege to be currently ‘able bodied’ and to be able to evoke my mom in this way.”

The abstract and the literal 

In how it brings these ideas together, “A(way)” artfully melds the specific and the abstract.

“There are moments in the evening when the company are swinging limbs just milli-inches over each others’ heads and asserting such a level of visceral trust that, although there is no real traditional narrative being told, there are elemental urges and both instinctive and practiced physical rituals that speak to interpersonal relationships, patterns we all do, and that hold a certain level of intimacy as well. In this way, we are co-mingling the abstract and literal in movement,” Dorfman says.

He says the same holds true for a key duet near the end of the dance.

“Two women are dancing with such a strong sense of tactile necessity and urgency, yet you can’t quite put your finger on their relationship — and that’s on purpose — as it’s not meant to be one thing, but many, and extremely open to personal interpretation,” he says.
 

If you go

What: David Dorfman Dance’s “A(way) Out of My Body”

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: Myers Studio, Connecticut College, New London

Tickets: $24, $21 for seniors, $12 for students

Contact: (860) 439-2787, onstage.conncoll.edu