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Municipal Building is Stage for Dance and Civic Discussion
As luck would have it, the performer, Paul Singh, was part of the six-person troupe that Pierce had come to see. “I was looking to find the performance and it literally jumped in my face,” he said. Pierce became even more involved in the show when its choreographer, Risa Jaroslow, put a microphone to his face and inquired about changes in his neighborhood, just as she did with a half-dozen others during the course of the 20-minute performance. Jaroslow’s interviews, broadcast over a public address system, provided the soundtrack to “311,” a quirky combination of choreographed dance and public conversations about civic issues performed on several July afternoons at the south end of the Municipal Building. The dancers leapt at the building’s columns, walk around them horizontally (supported by other dancers), jumped, bounced in place, struck poses, pretend fought and did a bit of a minuet. All of this before and among a seated audience of city workers, tourists, students, residents and the many passersby oblivious to what they were walking into. Microphone in hand, the choreographer roamed among the lunch-hour crowd, asking how their neighborhoods have changed and what the city could do to improve their quality of life. Alan Gamble, 63, and his wife Katie Gamble, on a month-long vacation in New York, had no complaints. Soon to return home to Manchester, England, they raved about the subway system. “You might not hear that from a lot of New Yorkers,” Ms. Jaroslow quipped. “Tell them to come to Manchester and then they’ll see,” Mr. Gamble replied, drawing a few laughs from the crowd as the dancers stood in a line, arched their backs and lifted their arms over their heads. After the performance Ms. Gamble, a retired schoolteacher, said, “It’s so important that the arts are not squeezed out of a city. People need a forum to express themselves.” Jaroslow said she hoped that the visual stimulus of dance coupled with discussion of local issues would open people’s minds about civic engagement and the effect of government on communities. The title, “311,” references the city’s number to call for information and complaints, and her interviews frequently led to politically potent issues like affordable housing, the subway, neighborhood gentrification and the allocation of city resources for public amenities and the arts. “Right now there is so much focus on civic involvement and change as highlighted by the national [Presidential] campaign,” she said. “By putting dancers in a place where dance isn’t usually embodies the idea of change.” Initially, the idea was to stage the show directly under the Municipal Buildings’ arches, said Ann Marie Lonsdale, the Sitelines Performance Series coordinator for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which sponsored the production as part of the River To River Festival. Construction and security concerns pushed the performance 50 feet south into an area filled with park benches, tables, chairs, trees and food kiosks. The move made the show “a little bit less political but a little bit more community oriented,” Lonsdale said.
“It makes us really call on our listening skills,” said Rachel Boggia, 30, a dancer and a visiting professor of dance at Wesleyan University. She added that the dancers listened to each other’s warnings about oncoming passersby they might bump into. Sarah Young, 27, a dancer in the audience who lives on the Lower East Side, said that it was challenging to pay attention to the dancers and the interviews simultaneously, which for her helped the performance reflect life in New York City. “It’s more like a cityscape,” she said. “There’s so much going on that you can’t take it all in.”
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