Jean Isaacs Back on Stage for Three’s Company Concert

Mime’s the word for Jean Isaacs’ return to the stage at a Three’s Company concert this weekend. Three years ago, when Isaacs found her spirit willing, but the flesh and bones weak, she retired from the limelight.

And, though Isaacs insists she gets enough satisfaction from working in the sidelines, the performing bug was hard to shake. When the chance to mime her way back to the other side of the footlights came along, Isaacs jumped at it.

“Nobody is going to herald my return to the stage,” Isaacs said, referring to the pair of 8 p.m. performances at Sushi today and Saturday night. “I do very little in this concert. But I’m on stage.”

As artistic director of the San Diego-based modern dance troupe, Isaacs pretty much runs the show. She also teaches and choreographs extensively for the company she co-founded more than 15 years ago. But, until battered knees forced her off the dance floor, Isaacs was one of the leading dancers in San Diego.

“I’m not really dancing in this piece,” she noted. “I get to stand and make 30 different positions. It’s just a lot of body changes and facial expressions, but it’s very humorous--and at least it won’t kill my bad knees.”

The pantomimed merriment--all juxtaposed against the seductive strains of Bernard Rands’ “Memo 26 for Trombone and Mime”--was choreographed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer himself.

“Bernard Rands wrote the piece for (trombonist) Miles Anderson when he lived here in San Diego, and he also wrote the mime part,” said Isaacs. “Rands actually choreographed everything the mime does.”

Isaacs was also anxious to talk about a piece she choreographed for this weekend’s concert. She calls the three-movement dance work, set to Bach’s “Unaccompanied Cello Pieces,” “No Subject/No Object.”

“I think I’m on a little bit of a roll right now. I made this new duet for Denise Dabrowski, the most experienced dancer in town, and Brian Cluggish, the least experienced dancer in town.” Cluggish is a graduate student in physics at UC San Diego.

“Brian is very tall, and I’m using the size difference between them” she said, as a major image and metaphor. “He accentuates her frailty, her vulnerability. It’s mostly a dance for Denise. Brian is just doing the partnering, but there’s magic there.”

“No Subject/No Object” attempts to erase the boundaries between the self--the subject, dancer or reality--and the other--the object or dream, she said.

Erica Sharp, a musician/composer with a successful track record at Three’s Company, will conjure up the aural ambience for the duet.

Isaacs is also introducing another premiere--”Three Girls at the Ball.” This parody of the Southern California life style will be danced in comic counterpoint to “Australian,” an original score by Martin Wesley Smith.

And associate director Nancy McCaleb will provide her share of new works for the weekend’s performances.

“Aelia Laelia Crispis,” a twosome commissioned by the University of Nevada’s dance department, will make its local debut tonight. Set to the music of the University’s composer-in-residence, Beth Mahocic, “Aelia . . . “ is another of McCaleb’s experiments with mystical themes.

As McCaleb describes it, the title refers to “a medieval riddle which represents the mysteries of the divine androgen--the two in one, the original unity of humankind, the great he-she.”

McCaleb collaborated with sculptor Andrea Bjeldanes for “No Shade,” a dance with a decidedly serious side--the threat of a thinning ozone layer. Musical accompaniment for this provocative theater piece will be supplied by Anderson, on a make-shift instrument, and Sharp, who plays along on a five-string electric violin.

“There will be white Styrofoam cups blowing around stage, and Miles will be ‘playing’ a cactus. He plucks it and bows it, and it sounds really marvelous,” said Isaacs.

Although McCaleb acknowledged, “it could be funny,” she envisioned the piece in performance-art terms. “Sushi is the appropriate environment for that kind of thing. That’s what inspired me to make it.”

McCaleb will sustain a somber mood when she dances her own solo, “Sister of the Plague,” to an original sound score she designed for the work.

This pair of low-tech performances marks Three’s Company’s Sushi debut, and, as Isaacs acknowledged, “it’s such a small house, we couldn’t possibly make money on it. But we just felt we wanted to go downtown. We perform in La Jolla most of the time.”

Unfortunately, Sushi’s small seating capacity will limit the number of Three’s Company fans. And the Sushi show is the only one scheduled on home turf until next March. But McCaleb believes the Sushi setting will give local dance buffs a new perspective on the Three’s Company experience.

“So often our audience sees us on a big stage,” she pointed out. “This is an intimate environment. And this performance is special because we’re using all live music. We’re excited about it.”