Margarget Jenkins Dance Company, Danger Orange
Oct 21, 2004
By
RACHEL HOWARD
rachel@voiceofdance.com
Margaret Jenkins Dance Company in Danger Orange. Photo by Bonnie Kamin.
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The storm passed and the clouds cleared just in time for the premiere of Margaret Jenkins's Danger Orange Wednesday, and what a sight. Two screaming orange stages connected by a path of orange boxes stood on the vast expanse of the Embarcadero's Justin Herman Plaza. To the left loomed Armand Vallaincourt's hulking water fountain, its square, worm-like pipes wrapped in orange cargo net. On strode the thirteen dancers of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company in yellow tops and pants. Suddenly the lush palm trees and the Ferry Building, clock tower and all, became just an exotic backdrop for the eye-popping human drama playing out before it. Office workers on their lunch break gathered on the steps, the continual crush of rushing water obliterating all aural distractions.
Danger Orange, continuing through Saturday, possesses its public space in such a way that the contributions of its collaborators cannot be singled out for its success. Alexander V. Nichols did the bold but simple visual design; Jay Cloidt did the sound design, often filling the air with electronic reverberations that sounded eerily like gunfire. Jenkins, of course'one of the Bay Area's seminal postmodernists'created the choreography. Clocking in at 40 minutes and excerpting in full her 2003 work Fractured Fictions, much of it is not new. But all of it proves that dance can explore politically timely emotions without pushing a political agenda.
At a time when the nation stands on jittery guard for the latest Code Orange, the atmosphere on stage is full of tension and risk. Levi Toney hoists Kara Davis in the air, one hand gripping her neck as though he might snap it. He falls to his knees as though to vomit, but a hand rises to his heart. He pounds the ground and reaches to the sky. But all of this gesture is grounded in Jenkins's vigorous formalism, her gift for spatial composition now writ large across two stages and the spaces between.
Melanie Elms and Deborah Miller in Danger Orange. Photo by Bonnie Kamin.
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Dangerously intimate couples emerge and dissolve. Quartets grow ever more entangled in Jenkinspush-pull partnering. A block of dancers on the small left stage fall in and out of march as Davis duets with Manuelito Biag on the wide orange canvas of the larger stage. Cloidt's score grows heavy with the sounds of distant crashes'canonshots, gunfire, bombs, you can hear all of these in the abstracted electronica'and the larger stage becomes a battlefield littered with fallen bodies.
The dancers traverse the orange boxes like stepping stones, falling into the crevices. They line up beneath the smaller stage as Heidi Schweiker steps cautiously across their hands. The short final section is something of a non-ending, with the company continuing their slow walk off stage as a series of sudden chords jar the silence and Toney lifts Schweiker into that terrible neck-clenching lift.
Fractured Fictions adapts easily into the heart of this package, the dancers dashing to the busy eighth notes and constantly shifting time signatures of Patrick Grant's score. And the enlarged company is dancing beautifully, each dancer unique in dynamism but united by a piercing focus. Toney carried the central male role with disarming directness, his jumps and feet as pliable as rubber. Melanie Elms made every shift of direction hang in the air like a question. Deborah Miller danced with her own brand of gritty elegance. Phaedra Jarrett, new from Oakland Ballet, seemed coated in a fresh layer of seriousness. But these were just the dancers my eye noticed.
Political tensions run high as the election approaches, and Jenkins's new work reflects them. But Danger Orange is not, thank goodness, "political art." Ever intelligent, Jenkins has created a dance of visceral impact, not polemics, and presented it in a public space, where it is most needed, where we can gather with our common feelings and our divergent solutions. The company says they will continue to dance in the plaza rain or shine. Artistic heroes, every last one.
Margaret Jenkins Dance Company's Danger Orange continues through October 23 with daily performances at noon and an additional Saturday performance at 1:30 p.m. at Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco. All shows are free. Call (415) 826-8399 or visit www.mjdc.org.
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