Body of Work. - DTW's Bessie Schonberg Theater, New York, New York - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1996 by Gus Solomons, Jr.

Packing silk flowers into a carton, Rachael Jungels interviews seventy-two-year-old Evelyn Jones about her forty-one years of making capacitors at Sprague Electric; Jones's filmed head is projected on a portrait-sized canvas, worn atop Aaron Jungels's shoulders. Dancers maneuver panels into a mobile screen, on which octogenarian Angelo Turbesi, who as a union organizer spearheaded efforts to improve wages, describes his recent project: organizing his community to turn a local marsh into a park. Everett Theatre's Body of Work, an hour-long ode to the heroes of menial labor, comprises poignant, poetic images such as these.

The ten-year-old troupe from Providence, Rhode Island, codirected by Dorothy Jungels and son Aaron (who also designs the productions), includes dancer daughter Rachael; founding members Walter Ferrero and Marvin Novogrodski, and three newcomers, Bravell Gracia, Eddie Silvestre, and Anna Monteiro, students from a local arts magnet high school. (Jungels's other daughter, Therese, is managing director.)

Chants and dialogue, imaginatively derived from the filmed interviews, distill the joy of hard work and the burden of the workers' constant risk of displacement by automation or company relocations to cheaper markets. The vignettes spin into movement, inspired by the physicality of working, with dancers scrambling in and out of a rolling tram car--ubiquitous symbol of industrial workplaces. A Bach cello sonata (on tape) imbues the burly, pedestrian action of one stunning trio with profound eloquence. In another, the men, stripped to the waist, stoke a glowing furnace, while a nearby grinding wheel sprays sparks. The final tableau commemorates the dignity of labor: in a sea of white fabric billowing around her feet, a pieceworker steadily plies her sewing machine, manufacturing the garments we take for granted.