Music Registers Stronger Than Moves in ‘Fault’

Though hailed as a collaboration between dancers, choreographers and even UC Berkeley academics, Margaret Jenkins’ “Fault,” introduced by her San Francisco-based company over the weekend at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, proved interesting mainly for the collaboration between its composers, Alvin Curran and David Lang.

Collaborations between composers and choreographers are commonplace; collaborations between composers are rare. This one may be unique. The dance simply took second place.

Each composer wrote distinctive music: Curran for tape; Lang for the seven-member Paul Dresher Ensemble, which performed it live. Curran drew from found environmental sounds and the work of solo percussionist William Winant. Lang composed rhythmically reiterative music with pop music roots, verging at times on a crazy square dance, elsewhere on a meditative song.

The two styles alternated in the 90-minute piece, one segueing into the other, usually in large block patterns. But in one particularly complex and arresting sequence, the two interleaved, creating a third style altogether.

Curran’s music, with its electronic modifications, created a sense of trans-human dimension and time, evoking the geological processes that inspired the piece. Lang’s brought immediate, recognizable personal and social references.

There must have been a pattern or a logic as to whose music was heard at what time. But the “choreographic direction,” as it was billed, by Jenkins and Ellie Klopp was so visually uncompelling that the mind didn’t engage in trying to find it.

The work, the first danced here by Jenkins’ company in 10 years, fell into two roughly equal parts, the first with the dancers in rust-colored jumpsuits, the second with them in white. Dense rock formations were projected overhead and at the rear in Part 1; rock and open sky were on view in Part 2.

Toward the end of the intermission and into the beginning of Part 2, a brief text by longtime Jenkins collaborator Michael Palmer was read over loudspeakers. Little of it could be made out until the audience quieted down.

Jenkins has worked with his texts in the past. Here, a few sentences sufficed, dealing with the ambiguity and individuality of perception. The controlling ideas, to which all the movement exists to serve, were geological ones and the metaphors they inspire. In Jenkins’ words, these were “rupture, displacement, slippage and resistance.”

Part 1 takes place seemingly underground. The dancers embody formations, forces and the new structures that result from those forces. Kathleen Hermesdorf begins the work standing still, then lets a tremble pass through her body and impel her into new positions around the stage.

Others enter, group and regroup, again and again. The action freezes, then restarts. Dancers link hands to form a long arch. They build towers with their bodies. Like bubbles rising from water about to boil, they speed up their movements and go all over the place.

The only problem is, it doesn’t seem to matter if there is a little more or a little less, something now rather than later or something later rather than now. Busy as they are, they don’t hold interest in themselves or in the patterns they unfold.

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In Part 2, weight and support are explored, usually one-on-one, and the work takes on some real interest. An opening duet by Paul Benney and Eric Kupers, a midpoint duet by Hermesdorf and Katherine Ybarra and the final image of Levi Toney and Sally Clawson, with Sue Roginski standing alone downstage, humanize the piece. Still, there’s far too much noodling around by everyone here too.

The other dancers were Michael Badger and Marintha Tewksbury. The costumes were designed by Beaver Bauer. David Welle created the photography; Alexander V. Nichols, the lighting and set design.

The Dresher ensemble, which helped make the evening, consisted of Dresher, Craig Fry, Paul Hanson, Amy Knoles, Gene Reffkin, Dred Scott and Greg Kuhn.