Seeing the San Francisco-based Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s newest work, “Light Moves,” was like listening to someone else’s exciting adventure. You felt one step removed from the true thrill, which in this case was the process that went into creating the work more than the work itself.
As with many of Jenkins’s works, this latest piece, performed Friday at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, was a collaboration, this time with visual artist Naomie Kremer, composer Paul Dresher and poet Michael Palmer. The 70-minute, no-intermission work explored light cycles within a day. Giant, quivering designs were projected on the back wall. The score was strident and intrusive.
The work was aurally and visually massive, yet it still left you at arm’s distance.
Why? Perhaps the answer is in what Jenkins readily concedes — that she admires choreographic process more than product. In the studio, she often gives her dancers general guidelines on which they are asked to improvise. This way, she is able to move beyond what only she can conceive. It can take hours of improvising in the studio to distill a few seconds of usable dance, and weeks of building up and sifting through those bits to build a complete work.
So, creating a work is a true adventure. Watching it wasn’t.
There was a niggling constancy of movement quality and pace in the first half of the piece as dancers continuously regrouped and re-partnered in duos, trios and smaller and larger ensembles. When they began charging into one another with full force, it was a welcome change. The dancers looked disproportionately small under the large, shivering background. Jenkins made the aesthetic decision to leave the dance pure and the images as background. Movement, art, music and speech simply coexisted. While intentional, this felt unsatisfying.
Dresher’s score commanded the most attention. He generated dense, cold sound through a combination of computers, conventional instruments and those of his own making, such as a giant hurdy-gurdy and a 10-foot zither.
Jenkins has been creating works for more than three decades. Her vision is clear and her fans devoted. Her works take patience and attention to detail and require the audience to go with the flow rather than command its attention. It is a style whose success is perhaps best measured by personal taste. One wishes that the outcome had the same level of excitement that it took to create.
Squires is a freelance writer.
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