Figures trace bond of dance, music
Shopping, unless you do it all online, is a contact sport. When it comes to home furnishings — beds and couches, tables and lighting — there’s nothing quite like seeing and touching them in the physical here and now.
“Trace Figures,” a new dance and music hybrid, gave the browsing experience a beguiling slant when it opened on Friday, Sept. 13, at San Francisco’s Dzine. Not only did 75 audience members get to check out the highend goods at this 15,000squarefoot showroom and art gallery on Utah Street, they did so in the company of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and a pair of splendid musicians, lead composer Paul Dresher and his collaborator Joel Davel, who performed on instruments simple and complex of their own making.
Artistic Director Margaret Jenkins presented her 70minute piece in five sections, each set in a different area, or “station,” of the showroom. The first four were brief, about five minutes each. The
final section, in the largest station, was longer than all the rest combined, at about 30 minutes. It was a successful piece of performance design, with the pert miniatures preparing the way for a substantial and summary conclusion.
These “Figures” got off to a wry and enticing start in “Field of Flowers.” Dressed in paintfestooned white jumpsuits, like a crew that had just gotten off work and wanted to play, the dancers slipped between two rows of wooden boxes poised on flexible metal legs. Cocked and set loose, the boxes swung back and forth like metronomes, the little balls inside emitting hollowsounding beats of different pitch and duration depending on the size of the container. The thock of Japanese wood blocks came to mind. So did the rattle of bar dice in a cup.
The dancers, who flexed and snaked their way through the “Field,” looked deadly serious about their duties. More than a few listeners, gathered on either side, were grinning at the polyrhythmic mechanical clockwork. Then it was on to “Octagon,” where Alex Carrington and Kelly Del Rosario probed, gently invaded and retreated from each others’ space to a ratchety spare soundscape. Interlocking rings of light suggested both a magician’s trick and the intertwining bodies below. The tentatively intimate dance duet, set on a snug eightsided platform, was the focus here.
“Frame Drum,” the title of which signaled the primacy of the music, reversed the equation. Here it was mostly about sound, which Davel induced from a percussion array set in a tilted wooden frame. The musician made this handsome instrument sound like bongos, steel drums and an Indonesian gamelan, morphing from one to another and finally sounding most like itself. The dancers’ semaphoric moves were like selfeffacing glosses. They, too, seemed to be listening carefully.
The “Handy Grande” at station four, a handcranked stringed instrument, produced a luminous drone. Across the room, taking his cue from the gleaming kitchen pans hanging on the wall, Davel added percussion riffs on various surfac
“Trace Figures”: Performance with artistic direction by Margaret Jenkins and music by the Dresher/ Davel Invented Instrument Duo. 8 p.m. Saturday, Sept 14, 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 15. Dzine, 128 Utah St., San Francisco. $25. (415) 861-39400, www.mjdc.org
es including a dented metal pot. Dalton Alexander and Norma Fong performed a limber duet that caught fire and speeded up. Michael Palmer’s recorded text of fauxmysterious speculations (“Perhaps it’s only a room we’re passing through”) was expendable.
Dresher and Davel conjured up their most absorbing music at the big final station. By performing and electronically looping phrases on two long tablelike string instruments, evocatively named the Quardrachord and Hurdy Grande, the musicians were part rock band, part jazz ensemble and part practitioners of the dulcimer, zither, sitar, hurdygurdy or ancient Chinese guqin. A vibraphonelike Lumina completed this colorful sonic palette.
Coming and going in different combinations and formations, the Jenkins troupe compressed and released energy in contrasting episodes. They gathered in taut scrums, processed in stopaction moves across the floor and got fixated on their own feet, lifting and closely inspecting them. Then they’d lose themselves in fullbody shivers, loosejointed jogging or lavish hip swivels. The patterns grow more complex and dynamic.
Moves from some of the earlier stations recurred, like memories spontaneously arising. They cozied up to the musicians; several touched Dresher and Davel lightly as they played. It was a fitting affirmation of the alliance the musicians and dancers formed.
“Trace Figures” embodied the essential bond between these two ways of making art. The audience, by walking among them, became active participants. It wasn’t commodities they witnessed, but process, propulsion, music and dance taking shape together in a shared space.