Margaret Jenkins Plays It on the Edge

Talking with prominent West Coast choreographer Margaret Jenkins is like sitting across from a compressed spring. The tall, trim San Francisco native may seem quiet, at rest, and even safe--but one always has the impression of power waiting to be released.

Jenkins provokes the same feeling of anticipation with her dances. The difference is that onstage, the spring is often unlatched and the energy allowed to burst forth.

“The edge is engaging,” Jenkins, 45, explains. “I really like putting myself into a position of danger.”

One of the risk elements that Jenkins pursues is artistic collaborations with people she describes as her opposites.

“I’m always choosing people who are reckless,” she says, “because of my own longing to be more reckless.”

Terry Allen is one of Jenkins’ examples. Allen conceived and helped create the sets, score and costumes for “Pedal Steel,” which, along with “Shelf Life” and “Georgia Stone” (the latter with a commissioned score from Yoko Ono), will be seen in the program by the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company in Royce Hall, UCLA, on April 15.

“Terry has a certain bad boy quality,” she says.

That quality has influenced the choreography, according to Jenkins. She calls it a particular kind of male energy.

“Men have a way of interacting that displays a brutal affection for each other and that is often also their way of relating to their art. Women would be hurt for years by that same style of interplay,” she says.

Allen’s object of brutal affection in “Pedal Steel” is Wayne Gailey, a pedal steel guitar player whose early demise was allegedly caused by drugs and alcohol.

The 35-minute piece, with its themes of nostalgia and desolation, takes place within the graffiti-covered walls of an abandoned Texas drive-in theater called The Beauty. The dancers, clad in the prom dresses, mini-skirts and hot pants of the 1950s, sometimes ricochet wildly and sometimes wander dreamily through the old tires and other debris of Allen’s set.

According to Allen, the dead musician and the decaying movie theater are direct symbols of the ‘50s and ‘60s rather than complex metaphors.

“That word usually strikes me as a last-ditch escape mechanism,” he declares.

Jenkins says that just as Allen hates metaphors, Rinde Eckert, a poet, director, actor and opera singer who is one of her collaborators on “Shelf Life,” is fond of metaphors. “He would love to eat them for breakfast,” she comments.

Watching Eckert, a tall, angular man who looks like a stretched-out version of a mischievous Black Forest elf, in his guest appearance in “Shelf Life,” one tends to agree with Jenkins’ description.

For “Shelf Life,” with music by former Los Angeles resident Paul Dresher, each of the seven dancers has chosen a favorite book and a character from that book. The seven books are linked together in the work by the narrative device of a man traveling across the country with those volumes as his only companions.

The dancers, whom Jenkins always gives credit as full partners in the creation of her collaborative works, also helped create the movement themes for the characters.

“It is a multiple history,” Eckert explains. “There is a character and an author and also a reader. We begin to look at ‘What is real and what is memory?’ and the apocryphal nature of history.”

The idea for “Shelf Life,” Jenkins explains, came from her fascination with the question of “how to tell a story.” She says that at times even the most sophisticated audience members have quizzed her about the “story” behind some of her abstract choreographies.

The dancers’ moves in the piece are somehow both connected and not connected to Eckert’s compiled text. They are dancing the inner echo of the words instead of the words themselves. Their eyes often focus off into the distance as if they were searching for memories.

There are sometimes recognizable gestures and movements: a painful, quavering walk, a hand cupped to an ear, another hand fanning the still air of a humid, Southern evening. Then they disappear again into the fog of abstraction.

At one climactic moment a dancer leaps through the air, is caught in mid-flight, thrown and caught again--all with a sense of absolute trust.

It is a perfect metaphor for Jenkins and her collaborators. They are all putting themselves on the edge; everyone is flying, falling, catching and trusting.