Dancing Along the Fault Line

It isn’t the cataclysm of earthquakes that fascinates San Francisco choreographer Margaret Jenkins, whose celebrated dance company makes its first Los Angeles appearance in 10 years next week. It’s what’s going on beneath the fault line--the perpetual motion of slippage, resistance and rupture that we may not even notice under the surface of life.

Her latest dance, “Fault,” won rave reviews from critics and audiences when it opened in the Bay Area in November 1996. “There is genius at play in ‘Fault,’ and surprises in its dazzling . . . performance,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle critic Octavio Roca. The piece features an original score by Alvin Curran and David Lang, which will be performed by the Paul Dresher Ensemble at Veterans Wadsworth Theatre on Friday and Saturday. “Fault” begins in silence. A lone dancer wraps herself with her arms, unfolds a leg, doubles over. Tremors quiver up through her body, pass on and away. Across the stage, another dancer stands immovable, his back to the audience, faraway yet somehow connected to her.

A geologist might call it “elastic tension,” the scientific term for the force of two tectonic plates moving past each other.

Dancers and geologists might not seem to speak each other’s language. But when Jenkins was appointed Regents Lecturer at UC Berkeley in 1994, with an annual six-week residency for three years in the department of theater arts, she pulled together a seminar for her dancers and university experts from geologists and physicists to political scientists and African American studies professors.

“We’d explore a term like ‘elastic tension’ and ask the dancers to come up with movement around that. Everyone saw something different,” said Jenkins in a recent interview shared with dancer and associate artistic director Ellie Klopp. “Ken Jowitt, the political scientist, had been quiet up to that point. But he chimed in that force and fragility have a lot to do with each other politically.”

Jenkins, Klopp and the company already had been propelled into the geophysical by a commission from the Repertory Dance Theater in Salt Lake in 1994 in celebration of the centennial of Utah. The company had plunged into John McPhee’s book “Basin and Range” and roamed the Utah landscape. The dance “Liquid Interiors” examined the quiet starkness of Big Basin country and the mysterious world beneath their feet.

Poet and translator Michael Palmer, a longtime Jenkins Company collaborator, brought French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to the mix. Deleuze’s book “The Fold” argues, as Palmer puts it, “that everything that seems stable is in motion, that things are constantly folding in on themselves.” For Jenkins and Klopp, already thinking in geophysical terms, this sparked the idea of a dance in which both our emotional and physical landscapes double back on themselves, in a dialectic between stillness and movement. Palmer would write the voice-over that’s part of the score for “Fault.”

In the work, dancers move in and out of pattern with one another, each setting off movement in another. The first section, danced in red jumpsuits in front of a powerful visual projection of lava-like rock, flows back on itself again and again. It’s so organic that Klopp laughs that none of the dancers can remember the order of the sequences, only how to dance the whole from beginning to end.

If the first section of “Fault” speaks more to the physical geology of fault lines, the second

is more personal, evoking the equally ever-shifting, impermanent human landscape. Against a luminescent blue screen, dancers, now in translucent ivory jumpsuits, seem fragile yet forceful. A dancer’s energy juts extravagantly into space, or, like a butterfly whose fluttering wings here ultimately disturb the air in China, a finger brushes a calf, so subtly that it can barely be seen. Bodies fall, are cradled, recover, familiar but fresh human movements. It’s not so much sentimental hope that is evoked, but instead what San Francisco Examiner critic Allan Ulrich called “mankind’s instinct for restoring equilibrium at all costs.”

The interconnectedness in “Fault”--and the collaborative process that created it--are Jenkins’ signatures. Her process of collective creativity is what sets her apart from her mentor, modern dance patriarch Merce Cunningham. Jenkins was part of the Judson Church movement in New York in the ‘60s, dancing in Twyla Tharp’s first company, creating dances of her own in alternative spaces and working for Cunningham training his dancers for 12 years.

“Merce is the center of his process,” says Jenkins. “I like ideas of all sorts and how they’re changed by others.”

What Jenkins appreciates most about Cunningham is his aesthetic “that anything can follow anything, that simultaneity is the center. . . . But mostly his independent mind. If you remember who his closest friends were--Cage, Rauschenberg and Johns--their work was very different from each other.”

In 1970, Jenkins left New York to return to San Francisco, where she had had her earliest training. She began choreographing, bought a studio and founded a dance school. Over the years, she would combine forces with many noted experimental artists, including the Kronos Quartet, composer Paul Dresher, visual artist Bruce Nauman, writer-composer-performer Rinde Eckert, videographer John Sanborn and designers Alex Nichols and Sandra Woodhall, as her work moved toward performance art and away from pure dance.

Jenkins was a pioneer in multimedia--using visuals, spoken text and taped and live music in her pieces. Like Cunningham’s work, her choreography has always been elegantly abstract; the dancer’s movements don’t illustrate ideas or identifiable emotion. But unlike Cunningham’s typically cool, analytical style, Jenkins can be hot and sensual.

In the ‘80s, Jenkins built her own company and a large repertory of works. They toured extensively in the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union, and dances were commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Walker Center in Minneapolis, among other venues. Jenkins herself was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two Isadora Duncan awards.

By the early ‘90s, like Tharp, David Gordon and other choreographers determined to keep creating dance in spite of deep funding cuts for the arts, Jenkins moved to what she calls “a project-oriented company.” She sold her interest in the performing space, hired dancers on a freelance rather than salaried basis, trimmed her office staff and moved her operation into the basement of her San Francisco house.

“Dance companies face the choice: Either put your energy into stabilizing resources or into making new art.” She admits the sacrifice is losing the past: a project-by-project company can’t devote time to preserving decades of repertory.

The strategy has paid off artistically, though, especially in full-length works like the 1993 epic “The Gates (Far Away Near)” and “Fault.” “Gates,” which looks at different social realities from the point of view of seven gates to a mythical city, is something of a prequel to “Fault,” exploring political and cultural fault lines. The two dances are very different in themes, physicality and movement style, but they are multilayered and more emotionally powerful than some of Jenkins’ earlier works. In the view of some critics, they also place dance at the center of her work, rather than giving equal play to text, performance, music and visuals.

Jenkins’ next evening-length work, a piece with actress Olympia Dukakis, whom she met choreographing an American Repertory Theater production of “Hecuba,” will celebrate her company’s 25th anniversary next fall. Dukakis and the company are improvising in workshops now; Jenkins will say only that it’s called “Time Away,” and that “Olympia is interested in our physicality, and we’re interested in her narrative thrust.” What’s sure is that the new dance will challenge viewers the way Jenkins always has. As she puts it: “Dance is a way of seeing as well as something to be seen.”

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“FAULT,” Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds, Brentwood. Dates: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $9-$30. hone: (310) 825-2101.