Without uttering a word, 9-year-old Marina Conlin tells a story about taking her dog out for a walk. She bends down to put on the leash, even though there is no dog and no leash.
When she is done, her friends applaud and prepare to tell their own silent stories using the art of pantomime.
But before they step onto the living room floor of a downtown Jersey City brownstone that serves as the stage, their pantomime instructor discusses different methods she could have used to help bring her story to life. Perhaps by showing how the dog pulls in one direction and then another, or merely by making facial expressions as the dog relieves itself on the sidewalk, Conlin could have made her story clearer and more effective. The four students laugh at the comic expressions of Grigory Gurevich, who once led a professional pantomime company that toured with Marcel Marceu, as he demonstrates these techniques.
This is one class out of 20 offered in Arts on the Hudson, a program dedicated to teaching children a variety of creative arts.
"I enjoy our performances," Conlin said. "It takes more concentration than other things. You need to focus more."
"They all make their own pantomimes here," Gurevich said. "They invent their own stories."
One of the children inventing stories is Gurevich’s 9-year-old son, Alex. "You can do stuff in pantomime that you can’t do in real life," Alex said. "You can become a bird."
Gurevich migrated to America from Russia in 1976 after political forces disrupted his professional pantomime repertory because they were opposed to the symbolic messages portrayed in the shows.
Aside from his performance experience, Gurevich is an accomplished painter, sculptor and printmaker who has had his work exhibited throughout the tri-state area. One of his sculptures is exhibited in Newark’s Penn Station as an installation piece. During the late ’90s, Gurevich recognized a need for an arts program for children in Jersey City, especially for his son.
With a mere $1,000 grant he received from the Hudson County Community Affairs, Gurevich created an arts workshop festival at the Boys & Girls Club in 1998. "I invited 13 artists of different disciplines and had them do a workshop," Gurevich said. The workshops included a demonstration from the artists followed by an hour of instruction. In this small fraction of time, children learned new ways to sculpt, paint and draw.
Gurevich would then take this formula of finding grant money and producing an arts venue to create a broad-based program for children. "I didn’t want my son to grow up in an artistically empty society."
Since then, Gurevich has received an annual grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. The first year he received $20,000, and than $30,000 for the past two years. In addition, this year he received an additional $20,000 Community Block Development Grant.
Gurevich has actively recruited artists, mostly from Hudson County, to teach these classes. "I met a lot of artists through exhibitions and workshops," Gurevich said. "I selected the best from what I saw."
The money has created a program that includes performance art, visual art and music instruction taught by 19 teachers from Jersey City, Hoboken and surrounding parts of New Jersey. In total, 150 students attend the program that offers two-hour sessions one day a week in different parts of Jersey City.
Victory Hall and The Boys & Girls Club have been the primary venues for classes, although Gurevich teaches his pantomime class to children in his house. Classes generally cost $75 for eight sessions. Many students are shuttled to and from the classes by two people hired by Gurevich to provide transportation.
For more information on signing up for classes, call 451-4862, or visit the web site www.artsonthehudson.8m.com. Scholarships are available for children that can not afford the standard price for the classes, and can be requested by calling 333-4100, ext. 129.