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Vertiginous moments

"A Slipping Glimpse"
Margaret Jenkins Dance Company
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco
May 242006

by Ann Murphy
copyright ©2006, Ann Murphy

About 100 people stood in Yerba Buena Center’s East Garden, waiting for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company performance to begin last Wednesday night. It was a gorgeous evening — the air iridescent with slanting 7pm light, the leaves of sycamores that punctuated the raised plaza — the stage for the dancers — tossing and shimmering in the wind. The crowd happily people-watched as it waited, and then, out of the blue, the dancers arrived from behind us, proceeding in a line with an almost courtly air and assuming stances among the trees on the plaza above.

Thus began the prologue to the evening, a modernist temple dance in the belly of San Francisco as we stood or sat four feet below the action. Fifteen impassive-faced dancers quietly moved through a series of distilled yogaesque poses fractured now and then by spare, postmodern semaphoring. Four dancers broke away, descended on to the stairs and added an emotive warmth as they smiled, curled their fingers together or transformed their arms into expressive tendrils that stood in striking contrast to the modernist cool of the rest of the cast. No wonder. They were Indian dancers from the Tanusree Shankar Dance Company, whom the company worked with during a month-long residency last year in Kochi, India. The entire group was beautifully dressed in diaphanous rose-gold tops and short flared pants designed by Laura Hazlett, a fusion of Indian kurtis with pajama pants and upscale yoga attire.

Once the prologue was over, the dancers plowed back through the crowd and we were ushered into the perfectly proportioned box of the Yerba Buena’s Forum space, an elegantly minimalist room designed by Fumihiko Maki. “Don’t walk on the red floor” the ushers admonished, trying futilely to steer us clear of the circular floor that defined the stage and linked the multidirectional riser seating but which one had to walk on in order to reach seats on the far side. This quirky contradiction captured something fundamental about the evening that ensued: no matter what Jenkins’ intentions were, her deeply American style ran to every corner and colored every niche of the choreography. Despite the presence of Indian dancers whose form of dance is fundamentally sacred and timeless, despite the allusive poetry of long-time Jenkins collaborator Michael Palmer, regardless of the brilliant set design by Alex Nichol and Paul Dresher’s inventive soundscape, there was no escaping the Western scope of the work and no available perimeter that would let one get around it. India was a visitor, not a shaper here, and any hope that Jenkins might serve up a vision of a deeper, less splintered future for the West was not to be found — not even in the more purely Indian segments which served mostly as a counterpoint, and an almost quaint one at that, of warmth and expressivity to the fierce pyrotechnics of abstract American dance.

On purely technical terms the 75-minute dance, with its title taken from a description by painter Willem de Kooning of himself as a “slipping glimpser,” was one of Jenkins’ and her collaborators’ most exhaustive and provocative undertakings since “The Gates,” which evolved after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. Like the 1994 work, “Glimpse” strives to make sense of the current “vertiginous moment in history” when inside and outside, past and future seem to blur and we no longer really know who we are or where the world is headed. The musicians, posted on balconies above, surrounded us with sound while the omnidirectional action took place in front as well as behind us. Melanie Elms and Deborah Miller embodied the regal and lithe end of the company’s continuum, while Heidi Schweiker, Levi Toni and Katie Moremen stole the show as perpetual motion machines. Indian dancers Debjit Burman, Jaydip Guha, Rashmi Karmakar and Sulagna Sarkar pounded their heels behind us on red platforms as well as manuevered nobly through the abstract action in the circular performance space.

In Merce Cunningham’s “Ocean,” which “Glimpse” echoes, Indian and African movement, circling otherworldly sound, and archetypical dance patterns offer intimations of what philosopher Mircea Eliade called the “really real.” By contrast, Jenkins turns to ancient dance as a kind of historical rock that provides ballast to a fundamentally positivist view of the world. When the dancers weave in and out in potent garland formations or explode atomistically, they find communion only as a group of individuals not as archaic, symbolic figures bound in a larger mystery. Soloists, like Schweiker, establish their strength and beauty in the relentless and diligent hard work of their dancing, not in mythic action. The archetypal collapses back into the individual, and individual experience is ultimately adrift from the universal. As a result, no real fusion or metaphysical transformation can occur, and we are no better oriented after “Glimpse” than before.

As the lights came down, the audience leapt to its feet in ovation. One couldn’t blame it. There was an enormous amount of dancing that was technically stunning and richly inventive, full of Jenkins’ trademark flutterings, lifts and struggling, anguished duets, as well as shaped by the colorations and impulses of individual dancers. The thanks goes to the dancers themselves ( also Joseph Copley, Julian De Leon, Matthew Holland, Hope Mohr, Ryan Smith and Steffany Toto) and to Jenkins’ crisp choreographic eye. But if it was a glimpse of another way of being that one was looking for, or of a taste of a real third way between the religious East and the secular West “A Slipping Glimpse” was not the place to find it.


Volume 4, No. 21
May 29, 2006

copyright ©2006 Ann Murphy
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