“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
