Secrets ?s JDPE's 2004 collaborative project conceived and directed by Judy Dworin. With a cast of 10 performers, it is a dance/theater/video production that delves into the secrets of our twentieth century past and how they unfold and resonate with the secrets that lie hidden today. Part I of Secrets, Hometown Hits, explores personal stories of gender and identity that are placed in the larger maze of secrets surrounding us culturally and globally in our present moment. Part 2 of Secrets, Hot Licks: The Story of the Radium Girls, explores the historical, focussing on the story of the Radium Girls of turn of the 20th Century America and how their story resonates with our present radioactive reality. The Radium Girls' stories are based on historical research as well as interviews with family members of the dial painters.

Hometown Hits features NYC performance artist, Michael Burke, and traditional Kathak dancer, Rachna Agrawal who address the societal cost of revealing personal secrets. In Michael's story he returns home to his rural Idaho town after ten years, to perform a piece exploring his identity as a gay man. Rachna's story concerns her having to leave home in her small and conservative hometown of Bihar, India after her neighbors discover that she is studying Kathak, a traditional dance form that became associated with prostitution under British rule. Michael's return and Rachna's departure from home highlight the fertile ground in which societal biases take root and the cultural cost of revealing and owning one's own identity.
??br> Michael's and Rachna's solo accounts portrayed through movement and text are followed by a duet "comparing notes" in which they explore how their identities as gay man and Kathak dancer translate into each other's cultures. As they reach out to understand each other, together they share their sense of living in a present day world of secrets, dangerous secrets that create poisonous avenues for others to tread.

Hotlicks:The Story of the Radium Girls opens with Marie Curie, played by NYC Turkish actress, Zishan Ugurlu, who, with her husband Pierre, discovered radium - a discovery that changed the course of contemporary life. It is an older Marie Curie that we meet; her health is failing; but she is tenacious both in her desire to continue to work and in her refusal to see some of its consequences. ?he reminisces about her life: her exhilaration in the discovery of radium; her idealism about its benefits for humankind; the extreme personal loss she experiences with the death of her husband and collaborator Pierre; the co-opting of radium by industry for financial gain; her struggle as a woman in the male-dominated world of science; and her inability to see radium's deadly potential.

Juxtaposed with Marie Curie's story is the story of the Radium Girls. It is 1910 - 1930's America and radium has been deemed a miracle cure for all ills. The Radium Girls, clock factory workers from Waterbury, CT, Orange, NJ and Ottawa, Ill., appear making dials that glow in the dark, radium dials, the new one-dollar watches. The radium is applied with tiny brushes that these 19- and 20-year-old girls just becoming women are instructed to point with their lips as a technique for faster production. Each dial has a kiss of those lips that now begin to glow in the dark with a cancerous aura. - From their factory stools they perform dances of work and innocence with gestures and hot licks that will ultimately result in their deaths.

What dances they could have danced if their too-short lives had not been cut off so abruptly. And we see those never-danced dances as a tribute to their never-told stories as Marie Curie continues in her lab, counterpointing their gestural phrases with the gestures of her own work.

Who could have known? Certainly not the corporate owners who had their own salaried experts attest to the safety of it all. The corporate Papa, ?layed by actor, Sean Maloney, postures no blame, no responsibility as the Radium Girls become quiet before death with minuscule settlements to their poor families. Five women in New Jersey speak out and go to court, only to finally accept a settlement. One of the "five doomed to die", Katherine Schaub, comes forward and we hear her story amidst the Radium Girls' last dance. Katherine and Marie Curie end the piece - each in their actual words, expressing their hope for humankind and the need to be of service for the betterment of others. We hear the testimony amidst a sea of whispers again ? this time contemporary secrets: Where are the bombs? No one can find them. They say they are hidden. Where are they? ?o you see them? We are killing to find them. Where are they? Where are they? ?ho invented such bombs? No-one will tell. And the lips on the video are glowing as are the performers as they mingle among the audience making silent gestures that gradually recede into the darkness.

Premiere Performances
At Charter Oak Cultural Center, 21 Charter Oak Avenue, Hartford