Year: 2026-2027
DanceForce Member: Cynthia Williams
Artist: David Dorfman
Community Partner: Hobart & William Smith Colleges Department of Dance & Movement Studies
Audience: 250
County: Ontario
Three-day residency with David Dorfman Dance March 1-4, 2027 at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. Known for their trademark style of merging highly athletic dancing with poignant emotion, the company has garnered great acclaim and has toured extensively throughout the world since its founding in 1987. “To get the whole world dancing” has been at the core of DDD’s mission as they strive to promote the appreciation and critical understanding of dance and seek to make post-modern dance more accessible by embracing viewers with visceral, meaningful dance, music, text, and visuals. DDD is committed to examining issues and ideas that enliven, incite, and excite, and note that our work fosters dialogue and debate about social change, personal growth, agency and a myriad of other topics. David and the company’s dancers and collaborators have been honored with eight New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards.
When not touring the world, DDD has regularly performed in New York City at major venues, including The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, The Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, The Duke on 42nd Street, The Met Breuer, and the 92NY/Harkness Dance Festival. DDD celebrates its 17th year as Company-in-Residence at Connecticut College where David Dorfman earned his MFA in dance in 1981 and then returned as Professor of Dance in 2004.
The HWS residency will feature three movement workshops: “Moving with Momentum,” described as a range of styles from release-based post-modern work connecting to the floor, to an eclectic standing modern dance. Concepts such a as weighted and grounded approach to movement, harnessing the body’s momentum and force, and various approaches to physical contact, partnering, and improvisation may be explored. A choreography workshop, “Making Dances as Social and Personal Commentary,” will encourage students to find compositional means for exploring areas they are passionate about, while balancing meaningful form and content to embody a socio-political essence. A third workshop, intended for participants with varying dance experience, is “Movements to Live By/Kinetic Diplomacy/Performing Citizenship,” which emphasizes creating community through movement, and the experience of team-building, esteem-building, and stress reduction from a collaborative process of building dances together.
The residency will culminate in a showing of the company’s work-in-process, “The Frontline” on Wednesday, March 3, 2027. In addition to showing the work, Dorfman will engage with the audience in a discussion of creative methods, the collaboration between dancers, musicians, and designers, and his passion for creating meaningful work that is innovative, inclusive, and radically humanistic.