Community Movement: Marking an Anniversary Through Dance

Dripping with sweat in the sweltering sun and 90-degree heat last Thursday afternoon, a man and two women crept across one another on the steps of Brooklyn Bridge Park, in DUMBO, froze in emotional tableaus, then silently fell to the ground. The three, dancers of the Silver-Brown Dance Company, were polishing a work to remember the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “Oasis 5,” which they will perform in the park Thursday evening. As in every year for the past seven years, individuals and institutions throughout the five boroughs are finding personal ways to memorialize September 11. The Brooklyn-based dance company’s artistic director, Eva Silverstein, has found hers through love.“Because it’s been seven years now I thought I could try to address how people miss their loved ones,” Ms. Silverstein said. “I, too, lost friends in 9/11 and feel it’s part of our city’s fabric and it’s important to make work that addresses that. I don’t just want to make something that’s beautiful and inspiring, or daredevil and physical, but something that speaks to people on that particular day.”“Oasis 5” is set to a rich layering of love songs: Patsy Cline’s “Anytime,” Judy Garland’s “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” and Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine,” among others. Over the past several weeks, Ms. Silverstein and her dancers have together developed movement material that conjures images and emotions from that day in September — a solitary soul crawls through a sea of bodies; another disappears behind the concrete slabs that lead down to the water’s edge, only disembodied limbs remaining; one figure obliviously strides through the beautiful day, while elsewhere a march funebre creeps by. Interspersed throughout these more solemn episodes on Thursday will be little vignettes of love and longing, wherein individuals reach out and gain strength from loved ones lost.“It’s not only about honoring those we love,” Ms. Silverstein said. “It’s also about dance, because dance is such a physical and human thing. That’s the best way to represent common humanity, not divisive, but a physical way to represent the hope that we can go on and must go on.”“Oasis 5” is a valentine to the city, Ms. Silverstein said. In some sense, though, it’s not just for the city, it’s also by it. It’s been shaped by passersby in many ways.“It’s interactive in the creation process because this park is frequented by so many people,” Ms. Silverstein said. “Tourists sometimes comment. Our rehearsal was captured on Belgian TV one day. Japanese photographers were taking pictures. When we’re rehearsing, a FedEx employee changes his schedule so he can be in the park one hour and he gives feedback on what I can improve. Kids from the Farragut projects come down and watch.”Additionally, a tableau of everyday people, less acquainted with performance, will set the scene for Ms. Silverstein’s stories of love, loss, and life. More than 30 employees of Goldman Sachs will take on the role of tableau vivant. Every year the company’s workers receive one day off to volunteer in nonprofit work, and a handful of them will make their way to Brooklyn Bridge Park on Thursday morning to be sculpted into shapes and cast as characters.“It’s important for me to put the community itself onstage,” Ms. Silverstein said. “The way I see it is that a lot of people are searching for something meaningful on that day. This way it’s not just about a Silver-Brown Dance modern-dance company. It really is also about the community. We’ll get an extremely diverse cast in terms of age, ethnicity, size, nationality.”In 2004, Ms. Silverstein created the company’s first “Oasis” performance to celebrate the opening of Brooklyn Bridge Park — DUMBO’s “oasis” of green. While working at the water’s edge, where sweeping views across the East River almost command contemplation, Ms. Silverstein was inspired to use the site for something that bore greater weight, and “Oasis” became a memorial project soon thereafter. Ms. Silverstein now commemorates the day through a different prism every year. Last year she linked tragedies, September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, in two disparate cities where she has roots, New York and New Orleans.“9/11 is a huge moment in history and there’s no formalized way of how we’re supposed to live that day,” Ms. Silverstein said. “There’s no holiday, we can’t look up names of friends who died anywhere, there’s no cemetery. You go down to ground zero and it’s like a news conference. There’s really no place to go to memorialize. I want to evoke a communal feeling through art and make something that’s an experience we can all share.”September 11, 7 p.m., Brooklyn Bridge Park, DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Community Movement: Marking an Anniversary Through Dance

Community Movement: Marking an Anniversary Through Dance

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