Risa Jaroslow & Dancers
Talking Circle
May 12, 2022
CounterPulse
By Sima Belmar
One of my favorite things about dance class is the time spent on the sidelines watching others dance. I suppose the main reason why we take turns dancing in smaller groups is to afford each other more space. But we also get to watch each other. We watch to learn, to rest, and to marvel at one another.
This was what it felt like to bear witness to the dancing in Risa Jaroslow & Dancers’ Talking Circle. The six movement collaborators—Sharon Dalke and Pamela Wu-Kochiyama (the “elders” of the dance), and Anna Greenberg Gold, Chelsea Reichert, Cauveri Suresh, and Erin Yen—had me in marveling mode the whole time. Technical, sensual, articulate movers all, each dancer exhibited a bodily surety that I found deeply satisfying.
The choreography is full of subtle surprises—a head thrown back at an unexpected angle in relation to the shoulders during a spiral to the floor, a wrist oddly cocked, power poses that morph into sloth poses into pin-up poses. There was so much delicious movement and because the CounterPulse theater is an intimate space, I felt close enough to chew it, to taste it.
Talking Circle was driven by the question, “What is the freedom you long for and what will you risk to have it?” (program note). But I didn’t think about freedom when I watched the dance. I thought instead about the word “articulate” as I lapped up the deep lunges, viscous footwork, and eloquent hand gestures. I wondered what I was missing but then, after the show, I listened to Jaroslow, Suresh, and composer Amy X Neuberg talk about the work. Jaroslow explained that the group developed 42 gestures to create their own language. So my experience of the dance as an exercise in articulation (as communication as well as the movement of joints) reflected the process if not the original driving question. It didn’t matter to me that I didn’t understand what the dancers were “saying.” Like an aria in a foreign language, I could ride the beauty of the choreographic specificity.
Neuberg’s score is a wild ride—acoustic instruments (cello, banjo) collide with ambient sounds (glass breaking, seagulls cawing, ocean waves) and Neuberg’s signature nonsense syllable singing (with some recognizable speech). Sometimes I had to lower the volume on my auditory sense in order to focus on the dancing because the score had such an epic storytelling quality. I’m not usually particularly attentive to lighting design, but I was very conscious of Allen Willner’s sensitivity to subtle shifts in mood as he kept all the dancers in their best light.
The piece looked like a community being together through the rise and fall of everyday affects—pleasure and pain, sorrow and joy, solemnity and jocularity. I thought, “Is this a coven? A deconstructed Little Women? Herland?” I did find myself wishing that Dalke and Wu-Kochiyama were given more to do because when they weren’t sitting on the sidelines (perhaps marveling at the others as I was), even their simplest of movements—slow walking, arms moving like the currents of a river—were captivating.
I wrote a whole dissertation about the relationship of talking to dancing. One chapter focused on the use of ASL in an early work by the Wallflower Order Dance Collective. The specificity of the gestures in Talking Circle often felt like language, which was intentional. The dance begins with these gestures, dancers in duets and trios, sometimes seated, in conversation with each other, performing a sort of call and response. That specificity extends to the lower body, moving out of the typical communicative gesture space, giving pelvises, knees, ankles, and, above all, feet the power of speech. And, for me, whether or not I understand what is being said through the body, I can feel, I can be moved, and I was.
Sima Belmar hosts the ODC podcast Dance Cast and teaches in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.
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Related posts:
Circling Freedom with Risa Jaroslow & Dancers - by Garth Grimball
Artist Profile: Risa Jaroslow
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