The Soviets’ Encounter With Modern Dance : Two California companies discover the challenges of performing before audiences unfamiliar with the art form

It is the final night of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s three-city tour to the Soviet Union, and dancer Anne Krauss is evoking the still grandeur of America’s Southwest in the concluding section of “Rollback.” As Terry Allen’s throbbing country score fades to silence, Krauss walks in a leisurely circle around the perimeter of the stage, conjuring images of light and of water with her gently rolling hands.

In the 500- to 1,000-seat American and European theaters where Jenkins customarily performs contemporary dance, this moment creates a charged and intensely quiet atmosphere. But here, at the 4,000-seat Oktiabrskii (October) Hall, the massive Soviet crowd grows restless. One particularly disruptive chap is clapping loudly. What to do?

In a blink, Krauss stops, gazes hard in the direction of the miscreant and puts her index finger to her lips the way an elementary school teacher does when things get out of hand. The huge throng is strangely becalmed. Finishing her solo without further disturbance in the slightest, she and the other three American dancers receive one of their biggest ovations of the Russian tour.

“I loved that she did that,” exclaimed Nikita Delgushin, director of the choreographic faculty at Leningrad’s Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, immediately after the performance. “Our people cannot see movement without music. In this sense, our audience is not ready to appreciate this performance. We have to teach them.”

Exposing Soviet audiences to the aesthetics of modern dance--a genre as ethnically American as ballet is Russian--was one of the major purposes of a recent and remarkable double tour by San Francisco’s most prominent modern dance groups, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Brenda Way’s ODC/San Francisco. Under separate sponsorship and with schedules that, according to company representatives, overlapped only by coincidence, the nearly sold-out visits were the first by any American modern troupe since Paul Taylor’s four-city U.S. State Department tour in 1978 and Trisha Brown’s breeze through Moscow last February.

Both companies were interested in raising big questions on their trips to the Soviet Union in November.

“Can the work that we’re bringing get past the proscenium? Can it infiltrate and resonate with a Soviet audience?” Jenkins says she wanted to know.

“Which part of the human spirit do we connect at? And what is recognizably American about us?” Way asked.

Before such questions could even be articulated, let alone addressed, however, the Americans’ relationship with the Soviets got off to some fairly serious, if humorous, missteps.

For ODC/San Francisco--whose self-initiated trip was sponsored by the Theatrical Workers Union of the Russian Republic--the difficulties began in Frunze, deep in Central Asia, where local presenters booked the company into an ungainly 4,000-seat sports pavilion and advertised the engagement with a banner that read (in Russian) “Beauties From San Francisco.”

“It was like a rock ‘n’ roll concert that first night,” says Linc King, the company’s executive director. “There were catcalls from the back of the hall--’Where are the beauties? Where are the beauties?’--and people walking all over backstage. We had to post guards.”

Jenkins, whose trip was planned by the San Francisco-based Soviet-American Performing Arts Exchange and sponsored by Orfei, an independent Leningrad agency that usually presents rock groups and art exhibits, had a comparatively luxurious and smooth-running tour. Still, it was fraught with intercultural gaffes and miscommunications.

On the afternoon of the company’s dress rehearsal in Moscow, for instance, Orfei’s representative casually asked Jenkins if some people could come and watch. She assented. Imagine the choreographer’s surprise, though, when, at 7 o’clock, 500 prominent Muscovites turned up, dressed to kill.

“All the press was there and old ballerinas from the Bolshoi and the Kirov,” said Jenkins, who had been planning a necessary stop-and-go technical rehearsal and who was unprepared to stage a full performance. When all but 20 of the most interested viewers left, clearly disgruntled, the embarrassed representative could only say: “Well, we just have a very different idea about what an open rehearsal is.”

As it turns out, the American companies and Soviet audiences had very different ideas about dancing too.

Certainly the biggest point of contention between the San Francisco modern dance companies and the Soviet, predominantly ballet-oriented audience was the question of what constitutes an appropriate body for theatrical dance.

“She’s got a good toe,” whispered Mariana Bogalovskaia, a former soloist with the Bolshoi Ballet, noting Jenkins dancer Ellie Klopp’s exceptional crescent-shaped feet during the first Moscow performance. “You have to select for that.”

But the evaluations could also be withering. “They look like body-builders,” complained Lara Berovkova, referring to ODC’s exceptionally strong female dancers. “Their dancing looks more like sport than art.”

“I understand that Americans have another aesthetic of the body,” explained Moscow independent choreographer Alla Sigalova, who visited Boston recently on an exchange with Emerson College. “But we are accustomed to the classic forms. I like everything in my life to be beautiful.”

Other audience members were struck more by the new movement qualities they were seeing than with the presence or absence of physical endowments. Olga Petrik, a teacher of Portuguese language at a local college in Moscow, said she was enthralled by the variety of body types in ODC’s performance. “The short one, she would never be able to dance here,” Petrik said, referring to the dynamic, though diminutive, Lizanne McAdams. “But she is very expressive.”

Likewise, an aspiring young actress returned each evening to Moscow’s Stanislavsky Theater to see the Jenkins group perform, saying, with the passionate conviction of one of America’s own early modern dancers: “It doesn’t matter what your body is like, but how you move.”

The 47-year-old Jenkins brought the debate to a head by performing her nude solo “Steps Midway” almost every night on tour. Set against an arc of wavy fun-house mirrors--”a metaphor,” she says, “for the way we distort reality”--the choreography for “Steps” was originally conceived as an intimate personal investigation. On opening night in Moscow--amidst loud chatter and the flashing of cameras--it seemed more like a public circus.

“I definitely thought that being nude would lead the audience to ask the question, ‘Why?’ ” Jenkins said, after the last performance was over. “But I was very surprised by the nervous response.”

Choreographically, Way was struck by the Soviets’ “lack of receptivity to visual abstraction. . . . They couldn’t see movement exploration for what it was,” she said, struggling to understand how her work looked from this new audience’s perspective. “It reminded me of when I went to Greece, and at first I couldn’t hear the language, I couldn’t hear the ends of sentences. . . . These were new movement possibilities for them, a new realm.”

Rather than being swept away by pure movement, Way said, audiences gravitated to narratively inspired choreography such as her “Loose the Thread,” based loosely on the lives of members of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group--even though, according to Petrik, “Virginia Woolf is familiar because of the title of Edward Albee’s play (but) her books are unavailable in translation.”

At times in “Loose,” the message was conveyed almost too well. A homoerotic duet danced by Ney Fonseca and Jeff Friedman sent a few audience members in each of ODC’s four tour cities bolting for the door.

Jenkins faced defections too, but for a different reason and with a different kind of dance: “Georgia Stone,” the featured work on her Soviet tour. An anti-war piece set to a tape collage by Yoko Ono (who turned up unexpectedly at the final performance in Moscow), “Georgia” was chosen by Jenkins because of what she perceived as its stunning applicability “at this point in Soviet history, when glasnost is posing questions such as ‘How open can things get? How much can we let everybody know about what’s going on in the world?’ ”

At its American premiere at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, the piece won a sustained standing ovation. In the U.S.S.R., however, “Georgia” was just reaching its peak when a sizeable nightly exodus occurred. (It’s the moment when Jenkins’ six white-clad dancers stop in their tracks to listen to a child in Ono’s score crying, “Mommy, Mommy, get me out of here!”) How come? Leningrad actress Tanya Kysovkina’s explanation speaks volumes about the present economic and social situation in the U.S.S.R. “We have so many of our own problems in the Soviet Union that we don’t want to think about others,” she said. “We’re not bad people. We just want to eat.”

In contrast, Jenkins’ “Miss Jacobi Weeps,” a love duet performed by Klopp and Jesse Traschen, was a big hit. At one performance, bouquets of flowers were thrown to the stage. As Jenkins explains, “It’s the closest thing to a pas de deux. “

Both Way’s and Jenkins’ communicative intentions came closest to realization in the Baltic Republics, where the independence movement is currently in full swing. In Vilnius, where the Opera House audience was warm, though noncommittal, Jenkins had a measurably stronger response for “Georgia” than in Moscow or Leningrad. The audience members, many of whom were standing or sitting in the orchestra pit, stayed right through to the end.

Performing in Riga, the capital city of the neighboring Latvian republic on national Freedom Day, the nine members of ODC experienced their most palpable audience connection of the whole tour, in part because of some savvy last-minute packaging. In addition to dedicating the performance to the specifically Latvian holiday, Way rechoreographed the end of her “Second Wind”--a dance that celebrates personal freedom--so that dancer K.T. Nelson would strike the pose of the city’s “Liberty Lady” statue, holding a lighted candle in her hand. “They did sort of storm the stage after that,” Way said, underplaying the crowd’s rousing ovation and the fountain of flowers that filled the stage.

Having traversed thousands of miles, performed for up to 30,000 people (as many as either company normally reaches in a year), and survived the perils of false advertising, precarious travel arrangements and more than one misunderstanding with a tour sponsor, do the two West Coast choreographers feel that the trip was worth it? Do Soviet audiences know any more about modern dance than they did before?

“From my perspective, anything that brings with it as much complexity as this did was an unmitigated success,” Way said. “It’s like relationships. The ones that matter are the complicated ones.”

Says Jenkins, whose Russian-Jewish heritage made the trip particularly significant: “Being one of the first since glasnost to come--and have major questions be posed about what the nature is of art--isn’t something that happens at summer camp. We go to the Kennedy Center and we’re being compared to the 20-some companies that have passed through over the last four or five years. There is virtually no comparison in the Soviet Union, which is a very refreshing experience.

“I feel more strongly than ever what John Cage said about art being beyond likes and dislikes. The point is the two or three people who are going to think differently about something for the rest of their lives.

“When I saw Merce (Cunningham)’s company in 1963, it changed my life, because I was ready to have the questions that he asked. I think there are enough people out there starving for some questions.”