It doesn’t matter if one is young or old, a professional or an amateur.
Throughout her decades-long career as a pioneering dancer, teacher and choreographer, Jean Isaacs says her most driving goal is to inspire “more people to be dancing.”
Her award-winning choreography has been performed in a half-dozen countries and taught to hundreds of dance artists of all ages, all races and all physical abilities.
Isaacs, 81, will celebrate her contribution to dance this weekend with “The Legacy Concert,” a compilation of choreographic works that reflects her past, her present and her future.
“I’ve made 160 dances,” says Isaacs, a resident of Rancho Peñasquitos.
“I liked it when other artists were contributing, but this is an evening of just my work. I’m excited.”
Dancers from Malashock Dance and from San Diego Dance Theater (SDDT), where Isaacs served as artistic director from 1997 to 2021, are among the performers featured, along with New York-based choreographer and dancer Monica Bill Barnes and SDDT founder George Willis.
Isaacs’ daughter Liv Isaacs-Nollet will solo in “Haven’t Seen Barbados” and daughter Emmi Fowler’s girls (granddaughters Hazel Fowler, 11, and Cora Fowler, 9), will perform in the show’s poignant “Coming of Age.”
San Diego dance icon Jean Isaacs’ 11-year-old granddaughter Hazel Fowler, pictured, will perform in the piece “Coming of Age” in Isaacs’ career-closing “Legacy Concert.” (Doug McMinimy)
In addition to running San Diego Dance Theater, Isaacs taught at UC San Diego for 23 years and retired in 2007.
But she is probably best known as the creator of Trolley Dances, the annual, site-specific collaboration with the Metropolitan Transit System that first launched in 1999 as a solution to the lack of affordable indoor venues.
Trolley Dances makes the point that dance can happen anywhere, around an outdoor fountain, on a café tabletop, and even on an escalator within a public library.
It’s unconventional and one of many choreographic ideas that makes Isaacs unique in her field.
A group of dancers perform during San Diego Dance Theater’s 2024 Trolley Dances program. Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
She graduated from Wheaton College in Massachusetts with a degree in literature and learned to love the power of words.
As such, she often incorporates song lyrics, poetry, text from books and her own voice to translate the message she intends a dance to deliver.
“Literature was really helpful in my work,” Isaacs affirms. “I look at other dancers and they are beautiful, but there is not a lot of content. I try not to preach but sometimes, I can’t tell one dance from the other.”
Another signature of Isaacs’ movement language is tongue-in-cheek humor.
Consider her choreography for last month’s Trolley Dances, when dancers between the ages of 60 and 86 performed to “Slip Slidin’ Away” a bittersweet song by Paul Simon.
“It’s metaphor for death — we are all slip sliding,” Isaacs quips. “I’m just trying to get a little lightness going because we are all so serious.”
In “The Legacy Concert,” commentary and humor are woven through “A Geography of Risk,” a dance about different types of relationships that includes narrative from Isaacs, Garrison Keillor and text from a travel guidebook.
Lasting nearly 30 minutes, with duets, trios and group sections, The New York Times described the dance in a 2001 review as “fascinatingly unpredictable.”
San Diego Dance Theater artist Cecily Holcombe, who first performed in “A Geography of Risk” in 2016, is restaging the work for “The Legacy Concert.”
“Working with professional dancers to explore the navigation of risks and balancing humor with caution remains remarkably relevant today,” Holcombe says.
“Love, war, death, babies, illness … all of those are themes presented as risks we take.”
Among the dancers in Jean Isaacs’ “The Legacy Concert” will be her daughter, Liv Isaacs-Nollet, soloing in “Haven’t Seen Barbados.” (Jim Carmody)
Isaacs’ choreography is also marked by what her students call “Jean-isms.” There’s the “cup of gold” move, in which dancers use their arms in a way that appears as though they are circling an energy ball. And then there’s what she calls the “sequential use of the joints.”
“You start the movement by rolling the shoulder forward and the elbow and the hand is stretched out,” Isaacs explains. “Then it rolls back in and the hand relaxes.”
Terry Wilson, a San Diego City College dance professor and the current executive artistic director for San Diego Dance Theater, was a former student of Isaacs.
She once danced in “A Geography of Risk,” in addition to many favorite works Isaacs created.
“Her repertory and movement vocabulary is demanding and athletic,” Wilson says.
“The music selection is exquisite and when you are doing her work, you are saying something powerful.”
Wilson said Isaacs inspired her to teach dance.
“As much as I love choreographing and dancing, she opened that door for me,” Wilson says.
“She believed in me and helped me to believe in myself — which I think she has done for thousands of people. Whether they are dancers, choreographers or audience members, I think her legacy is that she touches people’s lives with her artistry and teaching.”
As for the future, Isaacs is confident her influence will go on.
“I think everyone should dance if they possibly can,” Isaacs insists.
“’The Legacy Concert’ is three generations, me, Liv and my granddaughters. I have six grandchildren and they are all girls – dancers, all of them. Their idea of fun is a dance party.”
Jean Isaacs: ‘The Legacy Concert’
When: 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and next Sunday
Where: Light Box Theater, 2590 Truxton Road, Suite 205, Liberty Station, Point Loma
Tickets: $40, general; $25, seniors, students and working artists
Online: ticketleap.events/tickets/jean-isaacs/legacy-concert