Risa is a project of choreographer Kate Weare and cinematographer Jake Flame Sorokin, who masterfully blend the quiet dance (artfully shot in black and white) with Steinberg’s chatty reminiscences of her long career. Not her professional achievements (of which there are many), but rather, the personal choices: the way she became a dancer despite her father’s misgivings; the decision not to become a mother. “I was born to teach,” she says. “It’s where my passions are.” The film—an absorbing 20-minutes long—is a moving tribute to, as the filmmakers acknowledge in the credits, “an invaluable mentor to celebrated and emerging choreographers of our time.” Steinberg went to work for the José Limón Dance Company directly after graduating from the Juilliard School in 1971, and has taught for her alma mater since 2000, including a 9-year stint as associate director. She’s been active in the New York dance scene now for 55 years.

The dance moves to a hallway. We see a stretch of leg framed in a doorway. Steinberg moves in and out of the frame, lunging against a wall, draping an arm around her head like a scarf. This is a mature dancer, working with substantial gravitas. I could watch her dance for hours. Her entire being radiates confidence. “I learned immediately that if you worked hard, you got attention,” she says. “I am addicted to attention, and I love working hard.”

The camera alternates close-ups of Steinberg’s face, her forearms, her torso, and most prominently, her heavily veined hands as they slice and fold, carving space. Charming, vulnerable, resilient. She announces her love—and fear—of working with the modern dance pioneer, Anna Sokolow. And at one point, she claims Martha Graham and Sokolow were “ball-busting humans who happened to be gendered as women.” 

In one particular sequence, she stares defiantly into the camera while she crouches and steps, first one foot and then the other onto her desk chair, then lowers them down on the other side. I get a sense of her strength of character with that gaze—and when she talks of her love life: “My greatest relationship… has been my career. In human relationships, … I have found they are jealous of my other lover.”

It’s quite moving to hear her talk about taking care of a nephew’s twin babies during Covid. Her eyes well up as she relates what it was like to feel her priorities shift, and to realize that for the first time, career came second. I imagine that Risa renders Steinberg closely relatable to many of us as we listen. Risa is part of the Dance on Camera Festival Portraits program, scheduled for Sunday, February 8.