Fran Spector Atkins translates local tension into words and dance.

Voices of farmers and fieldworkers blend with guitar and percussion as three male dancers perform a series of lifts and turns. One dancer rises into the air before slowly collapsing onto the ground and rolling backward. Seconds later, the men leap straight up, arms in a V, bodies arched backwards, toes pointed.

In a piece about agriculture, a politically-charged subject locally and globally, some of the movements are literal: the dancers pick fruit from imaginary vines and writhe in pain from imaginary pesticides. But most are abstract, modern dance movements. The six dancers, three men and three women, pull and twist their bodies, intertwining arms as they turn, fall and catch each other.

The dance is called Common Ground, and, like Marina choreographer and dance teacher Fran Spector Atkins’ previous performance pieces, it blends music, spoken word, visual images and contemporary dance.

At two performances Friday and Saturday, Feb. 24 and 25, interviews with agriculture workers, images of farms, and newspaper headlines about immigration, subsidies and free trade will be projected behind the dancers.

The program includes two of Spector Atkins’ dance pieces, with media integration by William Roden: Figures in the Dust, based on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Common Ground, Spector Atkins’ newest work.

It also features dance, music and visual art from Alisal Center for the Fine Arts, which provides free workshops in East Salinas. Performers and artists from the Alisal Center include Ramon Silva’s folkloric dance company, Rondalla Armonía and Armando Sarabia’s musical group, José G. Ortiz’s and Hijos del Sol’s paintings, and Kirk Kennedy’s large-scale agriculture and landscape photography.

“It’s a performance, and fiesta,” Spector Atkins says, and, as such, upon entering the studio, admiring the artwork and listening to live music, attendees will also be treated to Salinas Valley veggies and Martinelli’s cider. The folkloric dances will come next, followed by Spector Atkins’ two media/dance pieces.

Common Ground explores themes found in Spector Atkins earlier works, including Figures in the Dust (2003) and Border Crossing (2004).

While working on Figures in the Dust, Spector Atkins says, she became interested in “the universal themes. I started looking at the issues facing farmworkers in California today. Why do people come to this country?”

In Border Crossing, she further explored that idea, interviewing five farmworkers in Delano, and asking them questions about crossing the border from Mexico, and working in the California produce fields.

“I felt that Border Crossing was a first step, a rough draft. I felt that the piece was subtle and successful in a very limited statement. In my interviews with farmworkers, I realized that is one perspective on a very broad problem.”

In creating Common Ground, Spector Atkins wanted to include many other perspectives. Before choreographing the piece, she spent six months interviewing people involved in various aspects of agriculture: fieldworkers, farmers from small organic and large commercial farms, people who do agriculture in schools, an attorney for a methyl bromide maker, a woman who sprays pesticides on crops. The resulting work examines some tensions in agriculture. The piece and isn’t afraid to take on controversial topics, including immigration, land development, pesticide use and other environmental issues and global free trade.

Common Ground is divided into five sections. The first brings in voices from the agriculture industry. “There’s a sense of hopelessness when you think about land prices and water regulations and the competition in the world market,” Spector Atkins says. “The small farmer is being pushed out.”

The second piece speaks in the voices of farmworkers and it features one of the dancers, Barbara Giusti, who performed in Border Crossing. Spector Atkins calls section three, which discusses the process of growing as well as the desecration of the land from pesticides, “Earth Knowers,” a phrase one farmer used to describe American Indians and today’s growers. “He said, ‘You put your hand in the soil and it goes right to your heart.

“Most people do not understand what goes into growing crops—myself included,” she says. “We go into the grocery store, and we want our lettuce to be cheap and perfect but we don’t know where it comes from.

“I hope I have not been too superficial with things that are so profound, because it is a 37-minute piece.”

The fourth section touches again on agriculture in the world market, and the final one—the longest—is “a vision section,” she says. “Hope for the future. It’s more abstract. I use less text.”

An informal discussion with people interviewed for the piece and the entire audience will follow. Spector Atkins says she’d not sure what to expect.

“My work tends to be subtle. It’s not highly costumed. It’s not a big show. Maybe the exchange will be, very simply, an exposure to something you have never seen before. That’s my lowest expectation.

“On the other end of the spectrum, when I look at the piece it makes me cry. There is so much home and desire and yearning. The sense of agony of the struggle, and at the same time there is something hopeful and we can reach beyond ourselves. I feel this piece is that for me. I hope it is for others.”

The Common Ground performance and fiesta happens this Friday and Saturday at 8pm at SpectorDance, 3343 Paul Davis Dr., Marina. $25/general; $15/seniors and students. 384-1050 or spectordance.org.