Carolyn Dorfman Dance honors her Jewish legacy, its trials and triumphs, treasured uniqueness and precious commonalities across cultures and the globe. Among Ms. Dorfman’s preeminent works is the Legacy Project, a celebrated body of compositions that merge live dance, multimedia presentation and interactive dialogue to honor faith, survival and renewal as the cornerstones of her Eastern European roots and Jewish heritage.
As a child of Holocaust survivors, Dorfman reveals her heritage through dance stories that interweave the common threads of our humanity. The Legacy Project explores the rich tapestry of human experience and tradition through interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration.
The Legacy Project programming utilizes not only narrated performances, but also master classes, lecture/performances, workshops and panel discussions to explore themes of immigration, equality, and humanity through the powerful universal language of dance.
Carolyn Dorfman Dance can provide:
Carolyn Dorfman created Mayne Mentshn as a tribute to her family, from her nuclear and extended family, to the human race at large. It is about a spirit and passion for life, people and truth. It is about life, death, survival and renewal.
Tikkun is the bridge between the past and the future and is the natural progression for The Legacy Project because Tikkun encourages the audience to look forward and consider the future.
ECHAD, the Hebrew word for “One”, refers to the power of one community; the uniqueness or oneness of each individual and the delicate balance between the two, that is the essence of our humanity.
With Odisea, choreographer Carolyn Dorfman continues her explorations of the Jewish legacy. The work chronicles the physical, emotional, and spiritual journey of twenty-three Jews leaving persecution in Recife, Brazil in 1654 and their journey and ultimate landing on American soil in New Amsterdam (New York City).
ECHOES is an integration of Dorfman’s tour de force, Cat’s Cradle, Kahan’s powerful one-woman theater piece, Voices of Theresienstadt, new choreography, live music and text.
The yarn is both a metaphor for extraordinary stories of her family and the reality of her mother and her two sisters who knitted while telling their tales and thus knit the family together across generations. It is, in the end, a piece about connection and memory…past, present and future.
Cries of the Children was Dorfman’s first, but not last, work that dug deep into her roots as a child of Holocaust survivors. Bridging past and present, she explores the pain of “the witness of the witness” and speaks not about the survivors, but about the questions and pain of their children.
