Saturday, July 12, 2008

Customer Service Through Dance


This week Risa Jaroslow & Dancers were performing a piece in front of the Municipal Building, inspired by NYC’s own citywide call center. After 18 years of dance class and 4 years in the call center, I cannot express the joy this idea brought me – it was like a personal going away gift.

In execution, I admit a tiny bit of disappointment that they were so, well, serious about it (obviously the troupe does not share my irreverent sense of humor), but it was still fun to see art composed about my place of business. I even got picked to share my thoughts on city government (a little nerve-wracking), and they seemed delighted to have call center employees in attendance. I chatted a bit with Risa Jaroslow afterwards and while she expresses some strong views (one portion showed a dancer being relentlessly excluded from the group, which she referred to as “government giving the cold shoulder” – in another part dancers seemed to falling without a “safety net”), I liked how her work looked to gently engage the lunchtime crowd in examining their relationship with city government. -A

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