Current Project

Resist/Surrender

Whole Sky

Strings Attached

List of Pieces

Company Performance History

photo credit: Anja Hitzenberger

Risa Jaroslow choreographs as if her mission were to explore the common needs and visions that bring people together.        - The Village Voice

In Resist/Surrender, Risa Jaroslow peels back the veneer of our culture's assumptions about maleness and masculinity, exposing an explosive physicality. The piece asks what masculinity could mean if we reconciled our attraction to and repulsion from the assumed power of maleness.

In addition to the four professional dancers, Resist/Surrender features a chorus of eleven men from diverse backgrounds, including a math teacher, a sociologist, and a security guard who writes novels. Set designer Perry Gunther has created a cedar wall that the performers move against and over. By both supporting and impeding movement, it becomes a metaphor for the many barriers we meet with either resistance or surrender.

Composer Scott Johnson has created a riveting score for Resist/Surrender, based on recorded interviews with NYC firefighters; corporate lawyers; gay teens and senior adults; and counselors to men who batter, as well as an-all male poker game. Johnson took excerpts of the interviews, analyzed the pitch and rhythm of the voices, and transformed them into instrumentation. He then layered the original spoken text back into the composition. The result is an intriguing, complex composition that joins the classical tradition with a driving rock sensibility.

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