Trolley dancing: a San Diego partnership promotes ridership and dance-going.

Choreographer Jean Isaacs wanted to bring dance to public space and reach new audiences. San Diego's Metropolitan Transit Development Board wanted to lure people out of their automobiles and onto the snazzy red cars of its innovative light rail system, the San Diego Trolley. So in 1999, Isaacs, the makes-things-happen artistic director of the San Diego Dance Theater (SDDT), proposed they join forces for a mix of trolley riding and site-specific performances. Now in its fifth year, "Trolley Dances" has become one of SDDT's most popular programs, annually attracting a paid audience of about 800-1,000 (as well as hundreds of passersby at individual sites), showcasing some half-dozen choreographers and fifty dancers, and winning Isaacs a San Diego Dance Alliance Tommy Award in 2001.

It's been such a success that Isaacs, who founded the Three's Company and Isaacs/McCaleb & Dancers troupes prior to SDDT and also choreographs for theater and opera, has expanded Trolley Dances 2003 from one weekend to two: September 27-28 and October 4-5. And she's lined up a stunning roster of guest choreographers: independent dancemaker Victoria Marks, whose recent work includes Solo (A Portrait in One) for Homer Avila, who lost a leg and hip to cancer; and two internationally known artists now teaching at the University of California-San Diego, Allyson Green and British choreographer Yolande Snaith.

"I got interested in the idea of libraries, what they contain and how people behave there," Snaith said of her site, a whimsically designed library on the trolley route. "There's also the architecture of the library, which has this futuristic feeling that reminds me of Jacques Tati films." Also joining Isaacs to create work this year are Faith Jensen-Ismay of Mojalet and SDDT, who will set work on Tijuana's Grupo de Danza Minerva Tapia, and a postmodern collective called Group.

Logistically, Trolley Dances requires meticulous timing. The audience buys tickets from SDDT at the start of the route--which, like the works presented, is different each year, to explore fresh segments of the forty-seven-mile trolley system. Guided tours, leaving about every, forty minutes, cover four to six trolley stops and six to seven performance sites that have ranged from trolley stations to nearby plazas, public buildings, stairwells, loading docks, and a downtown hotel room where dancer Kim Epifano held court. A tour takes two hours, and the event runs for five hours each day. "We've learned," Isaacs said, recalling the first year when an over-ambitious plan resulted in an all-day event. "The tour guides never made it back!" That year was also grueling for the dancers, who, performed twenty-six times in two days; now they do seven or eight performances daily.

Isaacs also learned that, as she had hoped, Trolley Dances appeals to new audiences. "It turns out it's a different market for us besides dance people," she said. "A lot of families come with their kids--kids love the trolley; it's so exciting. A third of our passengers are paying students [ages 6-18, with younger children free]. And about a third are 50 and older. It's really nice to have the audience round itself out like that."

"I found it exhilarating," said Polly Cone, a two-time viewer, "that you could get on the trolley, which people usually associate with going to the ballpark or going to work, and it turns those experiences on their head. Seeing dance and riding the trolley--it changes everything."

For Jane Blount, managing director of the Lower Left dance collective, "it's a great opportunity for artists from across the modern dance spectrum to dance with people you wouldn't normally cross paths with."

The work created for the program tends to be brief (seven minutes max), fun, and inventive, such as a piece by Isaacs and Margaret Paek with dancers in business suits doing deadpan clowning around a conference table, or Epifano's hilarious hotel performance, in which she stood on the bed, sang a goofy song, and played the accordion. There are also moments of surprising depth--for Monica Bill Barnes's piece in late September 2001, she and Allyson Green walked around an enclosed fountain, putting on and then discarding pairs of pumps, just as women in New York City shed their shoes when they had to walk home on 9/11. "I wasn't able to cry until I saw that piece," Isaacs said.

Because it runs two weekends, this year's project will cost more than the usual $50,000; most of the 2003 budget is covered by a grant from dance-friendly County Supervisor Pam Slater. About half the budget goes to paying the artists and the rest to marketing, costumes, getting music at the sites, and the legal angle of permissions, licenses, and insurance. There's also extensive in-kind support from SDDT's co-presenter, the Metropolitan Transit Development Board. MTDB provides flee day passes for ticket holders, electronic signage, graphics help, and assistance in lining up sites not on MTDB property (about three-fourths of the sites).

Isaacs and Trolley Dances Project Director Sharon Hancock (who's SDDT's marketing and PR director as well) have gotten savvy, about rolling with the punches; for instance, last year when Jorge Dominguez arrived at his U.S.-Mexico border site with more dancers than specified on his permit, he was told by the Immigration and Naturalization Service that they couldn't perform there. Hancock had scouted another site nearby, and Dominguez quickly made the change. The new location was "this ratty, rundown upstairs of a stall-like store, and it was perfect," said Isaacs.

The choreographer enjoys site-specific work in part because of its unpredictability. In a personal favorite among her own Trolley Dances pieces, the sound system didn't work and "we ended up with the dancers vocalizing and making growling sounds.... Things happen when [you're] not in the theater!" Isaacs said.

Janice Steinberg is a freelance dance writer for The San Diego Union-Tribune and the author of five mystery novels.