“It is our responsibility to create a better, more humane world in which everyone can live,” choreographer Carolyn Dorfman told the Grade 8 students of Charlotte Latin School at an assembly on Monday, May 6. 

She was presenting her eponymous troupe, Carolyn Dorfman Dance, which performed excerpts from a collection of dances called “The Legacy Project,” about Jewish life in Europe and the shattering impact of the Holocaust.  “Most of my family perished at the hands of the Nazi regime during World War II,” Dorfman said matter-of-factly from the stage of Thies Auditorium. 

The performance reinforced this year’s interdisciplinary study of the Holocaust in Grade 8 — but on a different axis than a book such as Livia Bitton-Jackson’s I Have Lived a Thousand Years. “Because it’s not text, you feel the emotion and the content,” Dorfman said shortly before the assembly began, speaking on her decision to tackle weighty history through dance. “It’s still storytelling, but it allows you to invest your imagination in it.”

“The Klezmer Sketch,” a portion of a 2001 dance titled Mayne Mentshn (My People), captured the quotidian details of a Seder dinner, with seated dancers enacting the rituals of Torah study through synchronized gestures of opening books, which turned into ecstatic movement as they strained their bodies to reach for higher truths.

That joy made for a sharp contrast with other dances, such an excerpt from Cat’s Cradle, a work that featured music by Ilse Weber, who survived the Theresienstadt ghetto (in what was then Czechoslovakia) only to be murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Dorfman spoke of her impulse to make dances about the tragedy of the Holocaust: while she didn’t live through it, she could bear witness to those in her family who bore witness to the Shoah. Cat’s Cradle was a tapestry of sorrow, knitted together with balls of yarn, surprising symbols of life for her family. As Dorfman informed the students, “My mother and her two sisters survived because they could knit.”

The eleven dancers who performed took a curtain call and introduced themselves — they grew up in locations ranging from China to Germany — and Dorfman led the students in a discussion. She started her dance company in New Jersey in the early 1980s, and educational outreach has always been an essential component of her practice. As she told The New York Times in 1992, "Audience-artist interaction builds a future audience for ten years from now.”

Dorfman’s dances about history retained a sharp relevance in today’s fraught world. She cautioned the students of Charlotte Latin, “This is not just a time to remember, but a time to protect each other against all forms of hate.”