David Dorfman Went From Selling Leisure Suits To Leaping In Leotards. By Margaret Regan DAVID DORFMAN, AN award-winning modern dance choreographer who brings his troupe to Centennial Hall Saturday night, once spent several years of his life totally involved with suits. Leisure suits. "I was counting leisure suits, driving leisure suits," he says, talking rapidly from a Tucson phone booth in the middle of a frantic shopping sortie last week for costumes. "I worked in retail for two years. I used to ask myself, 'What am I doing with my life?'" Clearly, not what he wanted. Dorfman had been interested in the arts and literature as well as sports in high school. But when he arrived at Washington University in St. Louis, the 2arty intellectuals he met in his classes terrified him right into the business school. Fortunately for his future happiness--and for the audiences around the world who've been moved by his works--he underwent a kind of dance rescue. Selling suits by day, taking dance classes by night, he happened to meet dancers/choreographers, Daniel Nagrin, "my dance father," and Martha Myers, "my dance mother," who encouraged the young businessman to go East and dance. Dorfman did, picked up an MFA at Connecticut College, and has been moving in dance circles ever since. Perhaps because he almost never made it to the stage, his dance troupe, founded in 1985, has undertaken a mission to "break down the belief that dance is an elitist art form," Dorfman says. "Anybody can do anything, as long as they want to and put the time into it." Like Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, which performed here in February, Dorfman Dance frequently enlists non-dancers to perform in its concerts. The company was invited to Centennial Hall as part of UApresents' avant-garde Millennium series, whose theme this year is families. Dorfman put out a call for Tucson families to audition; the 22 Tucsonans he recruited will dance along with six professionals in the 30-minute piece "Familiar Movements," a work about families he choreographed in 1996. The amateurs, representing an eclectic sampling of family groups, have been rehearsing intensively with the company over the last two weeks. "Some have danced a little, some have never been near a stage," Dorfman explains, noting the piece has been performed in three other cities, with three other sets of community recruits. "We have a framework; the concept stays the same. We teach them dance phrases and they create." The work, set to an original commissioned score by Robert Een, is a little different every time, depending as it does on original contributions by the performers. The participants are invited to tell personal stories at different moments in the work, which, like most of Dorfman's choreography, is actually a dance/theatre amalgam made up of movement, music and spoken word. The result, Dorfman hopes, will be a piece that goes from the universal of art to the specifics on individual families' lives. "We have the responsibility to put a piece of art together. We're not psychologists or social workers. We're not trying to answer questions about the family. We're trying to focus a soft light on what family is, or what it could be." The program also includes "Gone Right Back," a work for nine dancers and musicians that premiered in New York City just this February. Dorfman plays keyboards--an injury preventing him from shouldering his usual accordion. Dorfman, Elaine Buckholtz and Shannon McGuire composed the music, which is also played on an eight-string "guitar" made out of a roasting pan, violin, drums and saxophone. "Job," a 1996 duet for Dorfman and his collaborator Dan Froot, goes back to Dorfman's business roots. The stage is set like an office, with a table and telephones, and Froot and Dorfman wear suits. "It's about maleness and trust. There's a lot of speaking. It's almost a theater performance." Dorfman's performers are miked so their voices can be heard, which brings up the issue of Centennial Hall's acoustics. At two major dance performances in the hall in March, by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and Streb/Ringside, the amplified sound was so loud audience members were clutching their ears in pain. At Streb/Ringside, the ushers even gave out ear plugs. The aural assaults detracted from the pleasure of the dances, to say the least. As Dorfman notes, his company has "a big sound thing." Centennial Hall ought to get its sound thing under control before his concert. David Dorfman Dance performs at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at Centennial Hall on the UA campus. Tickets, available at the box office or at Dillard's, are $9, $17 and $23, with $4 discounts offered to UA faculty and staff, students, and kids ages 2 to 17. UA dance professor Amy Ernst gives a pre-concert talk at 7 p.m. in Room 101 of Douglass Hall, just east of Centennial Hall. The talk is followed by a panel discussion on new trends in families. For more information, call 621-3341.

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