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Polly Ann celebrates women bridge builders Artwork for Polly Ann combined the image of a dancer with one of Joseph Blum’s photographs of Bay Bridge construction.A Bay Area creative dance production, The Ballad of Polly Ann, celebrated several of our carpenter and piledriver sisters recently, along with the other women workers who designed and built the region’s great bridges. The performance showed these women’s experience with physical work, tools, heights and machinery as well as their cultural experience working in a male-dominated labor force. The Bay Area’s majestic bridges are world-renowned for their enduring design. Symbols of America’s ingenuity, and affectionately called the gateways to the Pacific, these landmarks transcend individual narratives. But who were the people—in particular the women—who built these bridges? And what are their stories? Jo Kreiter, choreographer and artistic director of Flyaway Productions, assembled a team of artists and a labor historian, Harvey Schwartz, to answer this question using the personal narratives of several women bridge builders from the 1970s to the present. Some of the featured women have retired and others are working on the reconstruction of the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge. With the help of Tradeswomen, Inc., Kreiter was introduced to bridge builders including Audrey Hudson, Local 34; Silvia Ledzema, Local 152; and Heather Gher, Local 34. For The Ballad of Polly Ann, Flyaway’s creative team created a bridge replica inspired by the suspension system used on the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge. It was labor photographer Joseph A. Blum who originally introduced Kreiter to this bridge through his images. The dancers use the bridge’s construction elements to exemplify the physical and emotional risks as well as the physical labor required to work on the bridges. Flyaway and the bridge workers share a passion for the exhilaration of working high off of the ground. "To walk 100 feet over water on a stringer that is 12 inches wide with the wind blowing,"Heather Gher says, "the rush that gives you is indescribable, indescribable." Audrey Hudson says, "When we’re out there, we’re rocking and rollin’, locking and loadin’!” The production’s title is inspired by the lyric of a folksong, The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer: "Take my hammer, Polly Ann, and go to that railroad. Swing that hammer like you seen me do it. And when you’re swinging with the lead man, they’ll all know you’re John Henry’s woman, but tell them ain’t all you can do."Henry’s wife, Polly Ann, picks up his hammer when he dies and drives "that steel just like a man." The Ballad of Polly Ann enlivens the construction of the Bay Area’s bridges through new eyes, those of the women ironworkers, pile drivers, laborers and crane operators at a moment when the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge is being reconstructed for a new century. |
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