Jenkins’ ‘ Toward 45’ immerses audience
There are work- in- progress showings, and then there is Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s “Toward 45.” Technically, it’s a casual salon where celebrated choreographer Jenkins, her 10 dancers and longtime collaborators like musician Paul Dresher and poet Michael Palmer can share ideas they’re developing for a celebratory performance next season, the company’s 45th anniversary.
In reality, “Toward 45,” which opened a three- night stand at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance on Thursday, May 17, is a fully realized, up- close immersion in music, poetry, contemporary dance and theater.
It’s also the first time all of the collaborators — Jenkins, Palmer, Dresher, theater artist Rinde Eckert and scenic and lighting designer Alexander V. Nichols — have worked on the same piece since “The Gates ( Far Away Near)” in 1993, though they’ve collaborated in smaller configurations in the interim. “Toward 45” even includes a performance by
Jenkins herself; an original member of Twyla Tharp’s company and a former stager for Merce Cunningham, Jenkins, 75, rarely takes the stage.
The artists created 20- minute works staged in three different studios; though discrete and nonnarrative, the sections are linked by themes of life, relationship, loss and remembrance of things past. Divided into three groups, the 135- person audience moves from one room to the next to experience the works, which are going on simultaneously, in sequence. Your perception of the whole is directly related to which room you start in; everyone seemed to think the order they traveled in was the best of all possible orders.
In the largest studio, the audience sits in the round, encircling the full ensemble of dancers. An arm’s length away, Chinchin Hsu looks you straight in the eye, then steps back and propels into pirouettes that make her blouse billow. Corey Brady and Kelly Del Rosario muscle through lunges and floor rolls, while at opposite ends of the room — Jenkins is a master at choreographing in space — Selby Jenkins ( no relation) and Alex Carrington slither and extend in meticulously timed opposition.
In a recording, Palmer recites a poem he improvised for the room. “What of the future now gone, or that past still to come?/ I’m trying to remember.” Eckert and Jenkins appear, seemingly from nowhere, and walk slowly across the floor. “Michael was saying in this room it was like Rinde and I were ghosts from another time,” Jenkins said afterward. “You end up seeing us in another room, and it takes on a different meaning.” Suddenly you notice the dancers are all gone, and it’s time to move to the next studio.
There, Dresher plucks and pounds the strings on the Hurdy Grande, his custommade, 8- foot riff on the medieval hurdy- gurdy. Marlie Couto embarks on a sinewy solo, but Dalton Alexander and Crystaldawn Bell intercede and push, pull and loop around her. Norma Fong wrenches herself to the floor and back up again. Eckert drifts in and sings “ooh” in a bell- clear tenor, a postmodern troubadour responding to Dresher’s cacophony.
When Margaret Cromwell dances into the scene, you start to believe that these artists can manifest in several places at once — shouldn’t she be doing her solo in the other room right now? “In the beginning, it was kind of brainfrying,” Brady said of creating the illusion. “We had a whole chart of who would be where, when.” There may have been a master plan, but it looked like magic.
In the third room — or the first or second, depending — Jenkins and Eckert revive a section of their 1988 duet “Shorebirds Atlantic.” They’ve pulled on terry bathrobes, skullcaps and swim goggles, and at times their quirky head- cocking and finger flapping are comically seagull- ish.
“Death has become regrettably commonplace/ not the grand affair it used to be,” Palmer says in a voice- over. A dance- theater meditation on grief created during the AIDS crisis, “Shorebirds” has evolved in resonance. “It’s wonderful to do it at this age,” said Eckert, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist in drama for his play “Orpheus X.” “Before, it was about a young life that was cut off, and now it’s about an older life that’s cut off.”
A sense of being caught in the web of time permeates “Toward 45,” partly because the artists range from Jenkins to 37- year- old Del Rosario to 19- year- old Selby Jenkins, and also because of the no- beginning, no- end structure.
“Cerebral, simultaneous, organic,” said Lindajoy Fenley at the post- show reception. “Time warp — you’re trying to figure out where you are. But that’s how life is.”
You can take “Toward 45” as sensory- overwhelm performance art or as a contemplative ritual, as exhilarating or exhausting or all of the above.
“I felt like I was kind of traveling through different parts of myself and different parts of my history,” said Jenkins, who took the whole thing in stride. “I feel relieved. I’m sure tomorrow morning, when I can’t move, I’ll feel differently.”