When Risa Jaroslow moved to Oakland in 2013 from New York, after three decades in dance-making, she began attending her granddaughter’s dance performances with Destiny Arts’ youth company and was impressed by what she describes as “an incredible community gathering and an amazing show.” And yet, she felt she saw further opportunity.So she asked Destiny’s director if she could start a new branch of the organization: an Elders Project for people 70 and older. Given the green light, Jaroslow scouted for participants at senior centers, while Destiny Artistic Director Emeritus Sarah Crowell reached out to the grandparents of Destiny’s youth.
“We started with a group of about 17 people that summer, 2016,” Jaroslow, now 75, recalled on a recent winter morning, sitting in her Craftsman home near Lake Merritt.
The elders began each session with a meditation, then discussed their life stories and learned hip-hop dance moves that worked with their older bodies’ abilities. Jaroslow didn’t know at the time that she would later cast members from the Elders Project in her evening-length dance, “Talking Circle,” which had a run at San Francisco venue CounterPulse last May, and is being presented in encore performances at the Oakland TheaterProject starting Friday, Jan. 6, through Jan. 15.
But colleagues who worked with the postmodernist dancer-choreographer during her professional dancing days in New York, where Jaroslow presented work alongside some of the discipline’s most avant-garde artists, aren’t surprised by that development.
“Now there’s an emphasis on community in dance, but Risa was doing that from the beginning,” said fellow dancer and choreographer Sara Rudner, who met Jaroslow in Manhattan in 1974. “She was learning all she could from different social groups, ages, ethnicities.”
Among the many communities Jaroslow has worked with onstage, the ensemble of “Talking Circle” is one of the more mysterious. With a sonically rich score commissioned from Oakland composer Amy X. Neuberg, the dance presents six performers in rust-hued tunics, four of them between 20 and 40 years old (Anna Greenberg, Phoenicia Pettyjohn, Cauveri Suresh and Erin Yen) and two of them seniors (Pamela Wu Kochiyama and Sharon Dalke). A wall of wood along the back and simple chairs suggests a rustic setting.
As the dancers swoop, sweep and gesture through intense groupings, we can see that they are working to reach some kind of collective agreement, though we do not know the origin of the tensions between them.
“It’s always exciting to me when it starts,” Jaroslow said, “because the way the dancers come to the circle of chairs, you get a sense of each, and they feel like characters to me.”
的舞蹈,更抽象的灵感来源Jaroslow began 3½ years ago, was a question: “What will you risk for freedom?” The concrete inspiration was the acclaimed 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, “Women Talking,” in which a group of Mennonite women who have learned they were being drugged and raped by the community’s men gather in a hayloft to decide whether they will stay or leave. The novel, which has been adapted into filmmakerSarah Polley’s new film of the same name (in theaters nationwideFriday, Jan. 6), was based on a disturbing true incident that occurred in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia. There, escape was dangerous because the women spoke only an obscure low-German dialect. Though Jaroslow’s interpretation made the conflict abstract, the idea of an intimate language binding the women remained important to her.
“We started by developing a sequence of 42 gestures that we thought of as our basic vocabulary,” Jaroslow said.
For dancer Anna Greenberg, one of the younger performers, the movement language is deeply personal. “Those gestures come from my own life; they’re the tics I make every day,” she said.
This is the fifth full-length project in the Bay Area for Jaroslow, who was raised by an actor father and musician mother in a housing project in Queens, and took her first dance classes at the project’s community center with Murray Louis, now famed in dance history for his innovative dance work with Alwin Nikolai. She went on to study dance at Bennington College in Vermont and with a leading Merce Cunningham dancer, Viola Farber.
Rudner, who once created an experimental work that Jaroslow performed in 1975 for five hours straight, described her longtime friend as “a dynamite dancer with endless energy. The dances were always intelligent, beautifully crafted and very sensitive to the people she was working with.”
当前舞者格林伯格表示,并补充说the representation of community onstage is “not a gimmick, a selling point or a reason to get a grant. It’s what she’s always been into.”
In these tense times, Jaroslow fervently hopes this is what audiences will be into as well.
“I hope the viewer would be drawn into the idea that people can see each other, hold each other, but also be different from each other,” she said. “And there can be tension, there can be support. There can be power, there can be gentleness. It’s all possible.”
Risa Jaroslow & Dancers present “Talking Circle”:7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Jan. 6-7 and Jan 12-14; 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 8 and 15. $10-$50. Oakland TheaterProject (inside Flax Art and Design), 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland. 510-646-1126.oaklandtheaterproject.org/circle