Weather Report

“underground”
David Dorfman Dance
Kay Theatre
Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
College Park, MD
November 6, 2008

By Lisa Traiger
© 2008 by Lisa Traiger
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” goes an old warhorse of a song by Bob Dylan. Thursday on the University of Maryland campus, as around the nation and the world, the winds of change were blowing. What better way to reflect on these changing times than a look back at another period of torment and turmoil in American history: the 1960s. David Dorfman’s “underground” takes its inspiration from the radical peace movement sprung from the Students for a Democratic Society. If sentient these past nine months, you are already familiar with the Weather Underground, the SDS splinter group of which Bill Ayers, Barack Obama’s neighbor and sometime acquaintance, was a founding member. The so-called “unrepentant terrorist” is now a University of Chicago professor and the Weather Underground is once again newsworthy, for deeds committed 40-plus years ago, and an incidental friendship with our nation’s President-elect.

The Weathermen’s credo eschewed the non-violent protest tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement for a misguided series of targeted bombings of U.S. government buildings and banks. Dorfman, Chicago-born, typically crafts works revolving around interpersonal relationships, not broad-brushed history with current political and cultural resonance. But in researching the Weathermen he connected that earlier era of anti-war protest to the struggles America faces today, discovering that the '60s are still with us.

photo: courtesy Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center

Choreographically “underground,” which clocks in at just under an hour and features Dorfman’s 10 fine dancers supplemented by 32 local university dance students and area professionals, mines a kinetically dynamic movement vocabulary drawn from indelible images of protest. Raised fists, arms pulled behind the back as if handcuffed, slumped over torsos reacting to a punch, or ducking for cover, and the slashing, slamming, crushing forces of bodies amassed in a crowd bent on protest become the evening’s indelible images.

As the audience enters the theater, mingles and chats, Dorfman, alone on stage, pounds out an aggressive solo spattered with whipping limbs, a collapsing torso and sparring punches. The stocky 53-year-old, clad in army pants and a plaid work shirt, tosses, flings and slams his body in brutal and breathless abandon. Dorfman, in post-modernist guise, plays himself as a middle-aged Everyman, looking back on a time when protest was visceral, powerful, immediate. Now. But he can only look back, and wonder. It’s a telling tour de force moment, yet hardly noticed, until the music crescendos and the lights dim without warning. Quickly Dorfman raises a clenched fist in powerful dissent, and the crash of rock ‘n roll drums and a blackout give way to an upheaval of masses.

Imbricating in crisscrossing paths back and forth across the stage, the heady beat pushes the ensemble to flailing abandon, their legs lifted in slashing swaths, their torsos pummeled by the unbridled movement. Most exciting about these large group moments is the sense of chaos, edgy abandon, group-think above all else. Long a proponent of inviting community members to perform with his professional troupe, here Dorfman finds vital use for the heady life force this company of young, audacious dancers provides.

One company member plays a milquetoast news reporter, but with an imaginary microphone that he holds up earnestly. Others ponder their options and responsibility publicly: “I don’t know what to do,” “I don’t know how to be,” a woman bemoans. Then she dissolves into animalistic rage, crying, grunting, shrieking. It’s an ugly section in an evening that brokers no moral ambiguities in setting forth kill ratios and questions of responsibility, drawing a line where activism ends and terrorism begins. For the Weather Underground’s history is ugly: initially the group intended to bomb government installations on home soil to demonstrate the moral equivalence between those killed in Vietnam and American government workers (and innocent civilians) killed here. But when the group lost three of its own members as they prepared to bomb Fort Dix, the Weathermen shifted tactics. Terrorists they may still have been, but with a heightened sensitivity. They planned bombings at night, when buildings would be empty.

Cameron Anderson’s gridded background and projections offer up pertinent images of the past, shaggy haired protesters along with diagrams of the kill ratios. Jonathan Bepler’s music and Bart Fasbender’s sound design draw from the heady, charged soundtrack of the times, rock ‘n roll, with machine-gun like drumming adding a pulse and push to the high-demand choreography. Heather McArdle dresses the dancers in contemporary street wear, no retro-‘60s mod styles, just t-shirts and jeans, worn and comfortable army pants and collared tops. And Jane Cox’s moody lighting, dim but direct, sculpts the crowds into flailing masses, sometimes chaotic, other times militaristic.

Shouts of “now” become the cri du coeur of “underground” -- a call to action, a demand for change, a signal to duck and cover, a yell to propel the weapon with a baseball pitcher’s strength. “Now” also becomes a chilling evocation of the rawness and impatience of the Weather Underground’s youthful protestors and their noxious deeds –- bombings, armed robberies. The mob scenes recall 1969’s “Days of Rage,” when Chicago erupted in anti-war demonstrations, and a cat-and-mouse-like game went on as the Weathermen teased and provoked the authorities and the authorities hit back. Dorfman has the dancers play out their own game -- one step forward, three steps back -- on stage, the group shuffling around in a contest of Battleship trying to hit the right target. Later pairs meet up, jog in a circle, one upright, dragging/supporting the other who is slumped over, as if wounded. The game over, the reality of war and terror remains.

Dorfman has said that “underground” grew out of his own frustration from watching America currently mired in a pair of wars with no resolution in sight. But there’s little that’s black and white about the work. When a dancer declares, “I could kill someone and I can still be a moral person,” the rag-tag group takes on an insidious cast. In another game-like structure, invented kill ratios -– “If I kill 11, I can save 33 or 34 lives” and upward to the millions –- brings home the reality that violence can’t overcome violence, it merely begets more, even in the face of war and terrorism. Ultimately, nobody wins when lives are at stake, Dorfman’s work suggests. Cynicism trumps morality when that dancer remarks, “It’s simple: you kill, you save. It’s about taking responsibility.”

But then, in a moment of reckless abandon, the dancers cluster up to fling LED lights, against the back wall, creating a sparkling constellation – rays of hope amid the fear and frustration? Then the piece gets a murky and maybe too easy after its aggressive run-up. It’s too simplistic when a few dancers come upon a posed figure –- a statue commemorating a past revolution –- and decide to move it to a better spot. Again, we see group-think working, but this time, Dorfman suggests, for good, not ill. The group cheers on the individual. Hurray. Yet for what purpose? An easy resolution.

In “underground” viewers are asked to take the protests, revolutions and demonstrations at face value as a glimpse at an era when members of the young generation were willing to take a stand, at any cost and by any means necessary. But in the days after the 2008 presidential election, the legacy the Weathermen demanded through violence, change has become our nation’s new hymn.

 What Dylan penned in 1963 still stands:

“The line it is drawn/The curse it is cast
The slow one now/Will later be fast
As the present now/Will later be past
The order is/Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.”

Above, members of the Weather Underground in 1969 during the Chicago "Days of Rage."

Copyright 2008, Lisa Traiger

Published November 9, 2008