Of Jean Isaacs' former students who traveled here for her UCSD retirement party May 19, several are professional dancers. Monica Bill Barnes, for instance, came from New York and performed. The program at UCSD's Potiker Theater also included tributes and a reception, and some 250 people attended. Then there was Allan Cruz, who made the trip from Burlington, Vt.
“I came because Jean's very inspirational and means a lot to me,” said Cruz, a 1999 UCSD grad.
Although Cruz performed with Isaacs' San Diego Dance Theater and does ballroom dance, he's an engineer at IBM. That's typical of her UCSD students, Isaacs said.
“You get a lot of kids who are, for instance, bio majors, who somehow find their way into a dance class and think it's a great balance,” she said.
UCSD had no dance major when Isaacs started teaching there 22 years ago. Sitting in her company's office at NTC's Dance Place San Diego, the 63-year-old choreographer reflected on a career that paralleled the growth of UCSD's dance program.
Dance was initially offered through the physical education department, with classes held in long, narrow studios in the balconies above the basketball courts.
“It was hard to hear yourself because of the basketball games,” she recalled.
In 1991, dance moved to the theater department, and in 1995 it was classified as a major. UCSD opened the three-studio Wagner Dance Building in 1998. Since 2000, the university has significantly built its dance faculty – with Isaacs serving on search committees to recruit international artists – and a masters program in dance-theater is beginning next year.
The increasing official status has been due to “the great teaching of people like Jean,” said Margaret Marshall, who chaired the program during its growing years. “The program got so big, we had a thousand students per quarter, that the administration finally paid attention.”
Isaacs has been such a valued teacher that in 2001 she received the university-wide Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award. At the retirement event, 14 UCSD alumni staged an affectionate spoof of her enthusiastic style in front of a class. The woman who played Isaacs drummed on an empty 5-gallon water jug, a takeoff on a dance with water jugs that Isaacs choreographed for a student production.
Along with choreographing student dances, Isaacs collaborated on Theatre Department productions – particularly with director Les Waters – in what she considers some of the artistic high points of her UCSD years.
“Les Waters was doing Caryl Churchill pieces ... Churchill actually wrote sections for modern dance, with text-based movements,” she said.
A former literature student-with a B.A. from Wheaton College in her native Massachusetts, Isaacs felt in her element working with poetic language.
“Then we started the Chuck Mee series with 'Big Love,'” she said. “Chuck was faxing the pages the day they were going to rehearse it. It was a graduate student production, and they threw their bodies around like crazy.”
“Big Love” went on to the Humana Festival of New Plays in Louisville and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, after which The New York Times wrote: “As staged by the director Les Waters and the choreographer Jean Isaacs, the inner turbulence in each character raised by love and lust is made so explicitly manifest as to be breathtaking.”
Though Isaacs will miss her students, she feels ready to leave the university environment.
“Artists and academia, it's not a very good fit,” she said. “In a certain way, it allows us to be human beings and have a nice life, but I don't fit into the box that way.”
In January, two months after a difficult knee surgery, Isaacs premièred a tragicomic dance reflecting her feelings about aging and contemplating life going on after her death. She says she got her energy back, however, and there may be no such thing as retirement for someone who has founded two dance companies and the San Diego Dance Alliance and headed one of the three resident companies at Dance Place.
She's brimming with plans for new dances and for building up her Dance Place school.
“You can't bury me yet,” Isaacs declares. “I need to be here.”
Janice Steinberg is a San Diego dance critic.
Staff librarian Beth Woodcontributed to this report.
