Circling Freedom with Risa Jaroslow & Dancers
By Garth Grimball
Six dancers enter. They sit in a circle. Gestures are passed from one body to the next in acts of listening. There is no unison in the circle, no definitive conclusion. How could there be when exploring the idea of freedom?
So begins “Talking Circle,” Risa Jaroslow’s fourth evening-length work presented in the Bay Area, premiering May 12 at CounterPulse. The dance is driven by the question, What will we risk for freedom?
“You have to free yourself from something to have freedom to do something,” said Jaroslow. She was inspired by Miriam Toew’s book Women Talking. When I visited a recent rehearsal our conversation included the philosopher Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, questioning the freedom from—freedom to dialectic.
Jaroslow began the process at the end of 2019. In the ensuing three years, two collaborators moved from the Bay Area and the creative team went through every available rehearsal option: Zoom, outdoors, and finally, back to the studio. The limitations could be fruitful. Jaroslow turned the visual restrictions of the Zoom square into a choreographic task. “We could never see each other’s whole body,” she said. “So let’s use this.” The cast created a unison upper body phrase and paired it with individual lower body movement, and vice versa.
Dancers Anna Greenberg, Chelsea Reichert, Cauveri Suresh, and Erin Yen are joined by Pamela Wu Kochiyama, age 65, and Sharon Dalke, age 78, of The Elders Project. Jaroslow founded The Elders Project in 2016, and “Talking Circle” allows her to unite her professional passions. “Movement and age diversity makes a bigger picture.”
Much of the choreography is sourced from the dancers’ responses to prompts on freedom and the ideas in Toew’s book. For Yen, “I feel most free when I am understood through body language alone.” The opening circle expands out as solos and group dances weave through the space witnessed by fellow castmates. The circle’s perimeter serves as both a safety net and a container for the evolving movement phrases.
Jaroslow acknowledges a concept as charged and fraught as freedom is unlikely to reach consensus. “What is the freedom any individual wants, or the community wants?” she asked. “This show is trying to figure it out.”
Suresh shared the difficulty in defining and questioning the subject of freedom. “The word has such a multitude of, often conflicting, meanings — the freedom of, no one can tell me to wear a mask versus the freedom to control whether or not I seek an abortion, for example,” they said. “We might think one of these is really freedom and the other is a perversion of freedom, others see it differently, and we’re still all using the word ‘freedom.’”
The ambiguity of freedom informed the structure of the dance. “There are many circles inside ‘Talking Circle,’” said Jaroslow. “In a circle people can see each other.”
Risa Jaroslow & Dancers, “Talking Circle.” May 12-15, 19-22 at CounterPulse. More information: counterpulse.org/event/talking-circle
Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to Dance Media and SF Examiner.
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