When New York based choreographer David Dorfman attended a Sly and the Family Stone concert, he vowed to make a dance piece inspired by their music. Now three and a half years later, the David Dorfman Dance company is bringing their project, Prophets of Funk, to Kenan Auditorium Oct. 29.

Prophets of Funk, which has been touring since 2010, reinterprets the 1970’s funk genre with a more modern to postmodern dance style.

“It is not strictly funk, what we have done is reinterpreted the feeling of funk,” Dorfman said. “Our dancers are trained in many different techniques, modern, postmodern, ballet, jazz, hip hop and we try to do a fusion of these forms. We watched a lot of old soul train shows and TV and demonstrations of funk dancing, but we didn’t feel the need to recreate that.”

Founded in 1985 and stationed in New York, DDD has performed all over the world, traveling from Poland to South America and earning various awards such as the New York Dance and Performance Awards,  commonly referred to as the “Bessie awards.”

“[David Dorfman Dance] is very well known in the dance world, so it is a pretty big deal that we were able to get them here,” said UNC Wilmington Interim Director of arts and programs Shane Fernando.

Acting as one part in a trilogy of performances that Dorfman choreographed, Prophets of Funk is a unique event organized by UNCW Presents and funded by South Arts, a regional arts organization that gives grants to colleges in the southeast.

“A lot of what this dance company focuses on is the expression of various messages [and] being able to tell stories through movement,” Fernando said.

Sly and the Family Stone songs such as “I Want to Take You Higher” will be featured in the performance along with colorful costumes and Afros emulating funk fashion.

“I grew up in the disco era, I mean that was my beginning of dancing for me and Saturday Night Fever came out when I was in college and I put on some platform heels, did my hair really big and went to the disco, and that’s a little bit of a return, I wear some of those things like platform shoes [on stage],” Dorfman said.

 Dorfman, who grew up listening to Sly and the Family Stone, feels privileged to expose new listeners to the band’s incredible sound that mixes funk with soul and rock n’ roll. Through this project, his passion for the eight-person band grew stronger still after listening to the song thousands of times in the past year and a half in order to choreograph the performance with enough energy and complexity to match the music.

“[I want] the audience to feel sheer joy, a visceral kinetic reaction and a bit of a serious reflection as well,” Dorfman said. “My ultimate goal is to energize an audience to the music of Sly and the Family Stone, music that I grew up on that is charged with feeling, intelligence, a style that wasn’t yet well traveled or popular.”