Dance Reviews : Jenkins Company Offers Revelation at CSLA

Blunted ballet mixed with classical modern dance, gestures of suppressed emotion, popular songs used ironically, taped text, film and video, sexual ambiguity, personal detachment, and social alienation. The elements were familiar, but the performance of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company seen Saturday at Cal State L.A. was a revelation of concentration and beautifully executed movement.

“Rollback” played a drama of desolation against the lore of the Southwest, with film of lone Western riders (one upside down) and Terry Allen’s Spanish-inflected score featuring “Home on the Range” in English and in French.

A bright, bouncy Tharpian opening gave way to Tharpian lyricism alternating with Tharpian propulsion. Solitude was the underlying reality, and Anne Krauss summed it up when she blew across her palm at the audience (a recurring motif of dismissal) and danced off alone into the darkness.

Ellie Klopp and Jesse Traschen made contact but never connected in “Miss Jacobi Weeps,” (music by Miguel Frasconi), a survey of the standoff of the sexes. Sweeping, elastic movement reached outward, but the gaze turned inward. Moments of tenderness were spurned or dissipated in this pas de deux of blank despair.

“Woman Window Square,” a collaboration by Jenkins, Rinde Eckert and John Sanborn, explored the disappearance of the individual and the extinction of privacy. Inquiry and interrogation sought “private moments and daydreams” through layers of recollection. Uniformed dancers collapsed like dominoes and paced within their confines as Jenkins, the white-coated clinician/authoritarian, patrolled and observed.