Margaret Jenkins Dance Company presents: 3 Decades of Dance, 30th Anniversary Celebration
April 28, 2003
By
ALLAN ULRICH
allan@voiceofdance.com
Margaret Jenkins Dance Company in Fractured Fictions. Photo by Bonnie Kamin
Call her doyenne. What the West Coast owes dancer-choreographer Margaret Jenkins is, quite simply, an awareness of possibilities. Thirty years ago, after a stint of dancing in New York (with Twyla Tharp and others) and teaching with Merce Cunningham, she returned to her native San Francisco and opened a studio. What she taught was a species of modernism, which transcended the strictures of the dominant Martha Graham technique. A generation of students, given the spirit of the 1970s, were ready to break rules, and so, postmodernism was born in the San Francisco Bay Area.
To some extent, we can charge Jenkins with blurring the lines between professional and amateur; some of the bodies that performed in her dances in the early 1980s would generate raucous laughter today. As time went on, so did the selection process and Jenkins found herself choosing the finest dancers of a generation. The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company was founded twenty years ago, but in the mid-1990s, Jenkins disbanded her permanent troupe and turned, instead, to individual projects, assembling dancers when needed.
But it is thirty years of toiling independently in the field that Jenkins is celebrating in an unusual presentation this week at Fort Mason's Herbst Pavilion, a barn-like space traditionally used for fundraising parties and trade shows. Three Decades of Dance offers a bit of ancient Jenkinsiana, a enormous museum exhibit of decor and costumes from earlier Jenkins productions, a tape collage by Gregory Kuhn of earlier sound scores, excerpts from vintage dances with some of the original collaborators, and, yes, a short, 12-minute world premiere.
It's a thorough and exhausting, two hour-plus affair, and one clearly keyed to the converted, rather than to the neophyte, and, in its own way, a rather odd experience. Jenkins has chosen episodes from six older works. The earliest number in the sequence, No One But Whittington, was made in 1978. Included, too, are parts of Pedal Steal (1985), Shelf Life (1986), Shorebirds Atlantic (1988), The Gates (Far Away Near) (1993) and May I Now (18 Questions in the Space of an Answer) (2001). This collection added up to an excellent survey of Jenkinspreoccupations and taste in collaborators through the years, though, to be honest, Jenkins is much too complex and protean an artist to fit comfortably into a "greatest hits" format.
It was fascinating to witness in the lobby the pre-performance revival of the 1974 Interferences with Nancy Donnell Lilly and Virginia Matthews, the only one of three promised reconstructions to be seen through the end of the run. The model here is clearly Cunningham, but the language is tepid and unadventurous, though, at the time, it doubtless struck the parched local audiences as highly innovative. Jenkins found her individual voice soon after; No One But Whittington from four years later is, as far as one could tell from this excerpt, an adroit response to a difficult piece is music, Iannis Xenakis'Nomos Alpha. Jenkins flirts with symmetries spurned earlier, incorporates discontinuous gesture and finds a language that reflects the impossibly tortured harmonies of the score.
However, tearing from context Shorebirds Atlantic, a talky Rinde Eckert performance art number with zilch movement value, and Shelf Life disfigured by Eckert's unbearable ranting, will mean nothing to first timers. The fragment from Pedal Steal, a slangy Western number in calico and haircurlers, was too brief to register, and its marvellously witty drive-in screen set was out in the lobby, where it did no good at all. On the other hand, the bits from May I Now looked much better at Fort Mason than it did in the unfortunate Theater Artaud in-the-round staging, where it was encumbered with ugly decor. The cast is somewhat different and better now; one hopes Jenkins will consider reviving the piece in toto in a more conventional proscenium space; I felt Sunday that I was seeing this dance's quirky essence for the first time.
In any case, the newest dance, Fractured Fictions, is an anomaly in the Jenkins canon - a work of anecdotal, rather than epic proportions; I don't think she's offered a piece this concise in at least 15 years, and once it is recostumed - the trousers with floor-scraping flaps concocted by Mario Alonzo are truly hideous - this dance should be around for years. Incompleteness would appear to be the theme, a tough topic to translate into movement terms without the dance looking schematic or sloppy. Yet, Jenkins and the nine dancers - Manuelito Biag, Mary Carbonara, Kara Davis, Melanie Elms, Deborah Miller, Katie Moreman, Heidi Schweiker, Levi Toney and Oscar Trujillo, all familiar names in the Bay Area - pulled off the truncated phrases, abbreviated exchanges and sudden pauses, as solitary dancers periodically freeze while the remaining performers continue to swirl through the space. Patrick Grant's minimalist score - amplified far too loudly, like so much else at the Sunday evening (April 27) show - at least, doesn't get in the way. I couldn't think of a better way for a choreographer to enter her fourth decade of making work.
The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company concludes its run Tuesday and Wednesday, April 29-30 at Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason, San Francisco. For tickets, call (415) 392-4400.
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