Taking it to the 'Street'

Choreographer aims to bring blacks, whites together with a work that combines rap, dance, and violin

Anna Myer's dances are abstract and subtle, sometimes hard for the uninitiated to get a handle on. The choreographer's audiences aren't huge, and they're predominantly white, professional, and artsy.

It may be surprising, then, that Myer's latest production - "Street Talk Suite Talk," at the Strand Theatre tomorrow - is a collaboration among dancers, composer Jakov Jakoulov, violinist Mark Berger, and hip-hop artists rapping about life in gritty urban neighborhoods.

It's surprising even to the rappers. "At first, I thought, like, 'This project doesn't make any sense to me,' " says Anthony Marshall,17, a high school senior from Dorchester who has been rapping since he was 10. "Rappers and violins and, like, ballet dancers? These are three different things that do not go together."

"I have to say, it's a very odd collaboration," concedes Myer, 53, a dance teacher and former dancer with Boston Ballet, who says she knew little about hip-hop until recently. The idea for the piece came to her unexpectedly. One evening about a year ago she was at home watching Hilary Swank in "Freedom Writers," a movie about a teacher in a racially charged school who transformed her students' lives through journal-writing. The next morning Myer woke up with an inspiration for a dance that would include a violinist, a rapper, and a subtext related to race and inequality.

"It just came into my head: boom," she says. "This is how it happens for me. I see what looks like a stage before I know what I want it to look like, and then I work backward."

The inspiration for "Street Talk Suite Talk" had actually been incubating since Myer was a teenager in Cambridge during the racial turmoil of the late 1960s. "It was very volatile," she says. She remembers the day "the whole school flipped out," when fights broke out on every floor, riot squads came in, and the school was shut down. She remembers watching Martin Luther King's marches on television and wishing she were in the front lines. "When he died, I was devastated," she says. "He was one of my heroes."

Myer was briefly married in the 1980s to an African-American man; a few years after they split up, his 24-year-old son was murdered. "That changed my life dramatically," she says. "John's dying really shook up my world." She stopped dancing, moved to New Hampshire and waitressed for a few months until returning to the Boston area and becoming a choreographer. She founded Anna Myer and Dancers, based in Cambridge, in 1992. She's now remarried to Andrew Tavarelli, a painter who was her eighth-grade art teacher.

Yet matters of race continued to concern her. "I've always been very conscious of the differences and the distance between blacks and whites in this community," says Myer. "I feel like we stopped somewhere and never grew: There's a line drawn in the middle of the city, and people don't mix."

It occurred to her that the dance she was formulating had the potential to bring black and white communities closer together. She mentioned her idea to Jakov Jakoulov, a Boston composer and pianist who accompanies the ballet classes she teaches in Cambridge; in 2004, they'd collaborated on a well-received New York production, "All At Once," with dancers and 12 string players from the Juilliard School.

Would he write the music? He didn't hesitate, though composing for violin and rap artists was, he says, "a pretty bizarre combination." Next, Myer needed to find rappers. She contacted Anthony Toombs, who does community work with at-risk youth, and asked him for some leads. He suggested Marshall, his wife's nephew, and Marshall's cousin, Lynn Harris, both seniors at South Boston High School. Other contacts led to seven more young people including Tu Phan, a Dorchester freshman at Northeastern University who does spoken-word poetry, and TiElla Grimes, a recent graduate of Newbury College.

Myer outlined the themes of the dances she was choreographing - love, anger, death, the feeling of being trapped and constrained in a dangerous world - and asked them to write something for her. "Somehow we all seemed to be on the same page," she says. Marshall, who describes himself as a typical senior who "goes to school, raps, and basically stays out of trouble," contributed a fast-paced, breathless rap about a man fleeing the police. "I'm not a violent kid, but growing up in Dorchester I've seen a bunch of stuff, violence and fights," he says. "It's everyday life. I can picture it."

Tu Phan wrote a piece about being in a straitjacket: "Your second amendment says that I have the right to bear arms but you covered them up with conformity. Why would you do that? I don't need any guns to avenge this violence you've done to me . . ."

"The poem is heartwrenching," says Myer, who dissolved into tears after Phan performed the poem at a rehearsal last week, his hands crossed at the wrist as though bound in a straitjacket, the dancers and rappers encircling him on the floor. "That was intense."

Jakoulov, who says working with the rap artists has been fascinating, likens their work to blues and spirituals. "It's the same self-confession, the same lament," he says. "But here it's just a musical skeleton, a dehumanized, naked rhythm, with words. These guys are describing their whole lives, and it is extremely tragic."

Myer hopes to attract a diverse audience to the production, including fans of both hip-hop and dance. (To facilitate this, she's hosting a series of dinners around Boston before the show, and hiring buses to bring people directly from dinner to the Strand.)

"Some people said I'd never be able to get these communities together," says Myer. "But I guarantee that with the intensity of the dance, the sadness of the violin, and the expressiveness of these stories it will be very intense and very effective. I don't question my vision of that."