It's spring, so that means it's dance season in the Bay Area. You can't throw a rock without hitting a would-be choreographer or aspiring dancer. Lucky for local dance aficionados, this also means that the veteran dance companies break out the big guns. In this case, it was the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company (MJDC) that premiered a new work at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this past week.
Jenkins has long been a respected local artist known for her rigorous intellectual inquiry and collaborative skills. Her pieces can sometimes be long on cerebral deliberation and short on the audience's attention span. This is an artist who is clearly not part of the MTV Generation.
A Slipping Glance was last Thursday night's offering, and despite the esoteric title, Jenkins delivers a full-length piece full of ideas, challenges and uneven dancing. A Slipping Glance is a collaboration that began with the company traveling to India to do a residency at Kochi in 2005. In India, the company worked with the Tanusree Shankar Dance Company, in an international dance exchange that was later supplemented by exchanging choreographic ideas via DVDs that were sent FedEx.
The piece opened with a prologue in the Yerba Buena Gardens, complete with San Francisco's infamous gusting winds and a group of dancers that looked like they were freezing. Composer Paul Dresher created an live aural installation that included ambient noise, birds chirping and air-raid sirens. The dancers from the Indian company seemed incongruent until the choreography began to shift focus and they led the audience into the YBCA Forum. In the Forum, Visual Design Artist Alexander V. Nichols had created an intriguing theatre-in-the-round that featured eight platforms behind the audience, connected by catwalks. The beauty of Nichols' work became apparent with his lighting design that blended seamlessly with Jenkins' choreographic direction. Additional text was supplied by poet Michael Palmer and designed by Gregory T. Kuhn.
The basic choreographic premise of A Slipping Glance was the cultural meeting ground between classical Indian dance and the contemporary American idiom. Some parts were successful, while others seemed to meander. The MJDC dancers initially appeared like bumbling Americans while the dancers from India moved serenely, gliding and dodging the brutish Westerners. As the piece developed, the roles began to meld as the Indian dancers began to move outside their comfort zone, utilizing contemporary movement, never losing their serene smiles. Meanwhile, the MJDC dancers adopted what seemed like movement they had learned during their time in Kochi.
Strong women
MJDC has a unit of women that are some of the Bay Area's strongest female contemporary dancers, led by the elegant Deborah Miller and diminutive dynamo Heidi Schweiker. Miller is masterful and commands the viewer's attention, while Schweiker is the energizer bunny who just keeps coming back. Among the men, there was a surprising lack of élan and alignment. Powerhouse Levy Toney was the proverbial bull-in-a-china-shop, but it was newcomer Matthew Holland who was the most charismatic addition to the men's contingent.
A Slipping Glance fosters some important questions about cultural exchanges, globalization and artistic integrity. At times, the classical Indian dancers' movement seemed diluted by the contemporary vernacular; the performers looked their strongest when using the classical language. When the American dancers began to use the Indian motifs and style, there was an inherent awkwardness. At what point does the value of an exchange of cultural ideas begin to outweigh the importance of movement integrity? Jenkins may want to go back and re-examine these issues, but overall, A Slipping Glance was an interesting experiment, cohesive but flawed.
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Margaret Jenkins Dance Company at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., SF, through May 27 at 7 p.m. Tickets ($21-$25) at (415) 978-ARTS or www.ybca.org.