Margaret Jenkins Dance Company News

mjdc news - spring 2011

SAVE-THE-DATE: Light Moves, November 3 – 5, 2011 at YBCA

Two Years in the Making: The World Premiere of Light Moves

Following a sold-out preview of excerpts from the work-in-progress at the JCCSF last October, the MJDC is back in rehearsal this spring and summer to complete Jenkins’ new full-length multi-media work, Light Moves. Jenkins continues her collaboration with her dancers, multi-media artist Naomie Kremer, composer Paul Dresher and poet Michael Palmer. Set to premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this November 3 - 5, Light Moves is a unique synthesis of dance, moving images, live music and text.

This piece marks the first collaboration between Jenkins and Kremer, a critically applauded multi-media artist known for her innovative process of animation which digitally deconstructs her paintings to animate hundreds of individual elements of color, brush stroke, texture and shapes moving through space (click here to see video examples of Kremer’s work).

Light Moves also reunites Jenkins with longtime collaborators Paul Dresher, an internationally recognized composer, and Wallace Stevens Award-winning poet Michael Palmer. Dresher’s new score, performed live by the Paul Dresher Ensemble, will intersect with Kremer’s moving images, Palmer’s text and the kinetic radiance of the dancers’ bodies, creating a shifting landscape of visual and aural elements in YBCA’s Novellus Theater. Tickets will go on sale this summer.

For more on Kremer's animation process, click here

Ralph Lemon takes CHIME “down the rabbit hole”

Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME) kicked off the second year of the cross-national program, CHIME Across Borders, during the first of four residency weeks with the 2011 Chair, media and movement artist Ralph Lemon. In its eighth year in the San Francisco Bay Area and its third year in Los Angeles County, CHIME is an innovative mentorship program for professional choreographers in California and around the country.

From April 11 – 15, 2011, Ralph Lemon worked intensely with three local choreographers, Catherine Galasso, Shinich Iova-Koga and Jose Navarétte, Monday through Friday for six hours a day at the Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab. The MJDC dancers, along with guest dancers Christine Bonansea, Dana Iova-Koga (Inkboat) and Debby Kajiyama (Navarétte x Kajiyama Dance Theater) assembled to begin the unique journey with Ralph and the mentees. Ralph spent the first day getting to know the three mentees and the next four days posing questions to be addressed through physical rigor, investigation and discussion. Each day’s assignments built on the issues, observations and questions raised the day before.

Describing her first week with Ralph as going “down the rabbit hole,” mentee Catherine Galasso shared, “Ralph is a rigorous thinker, practitioner of fearlessness, and a generous leader. He listens to everything and creates this total democracy of learning. He presents a safe space so we can live dangerously. He raises the stakes and makes himself completely vulnerable, embracing failure and reveling in what he calls the ‘detritus’ of art making. There is grave seriousness in his playfulness, and freedom in his silliness. I'm not coming out of this hole the same.” For more on Ralph Lemon and the Borders mentees, click here.

In more CHIME Across Borders news, on April 18, 2011, Margaret Jenkins traveled to New York with CHIME alumni Joe Goode and Alex Ketley to discuss the potential of an exchange between CHIME Across Borders, the Center for Creative Research and New York University. CCR is now housed at NYU, and the two institutions enjoy an interactive and scholarly relationship. Goode, Ketley and Jenkins, herself a founding member of CCR, were joined by other founding CCR members, senior faculty at NYU, as well as representatives of the Yale and Princeton's dance programs, to explore the future and evolution of this important new program in the field.

What the Leaders are Saying – Now online!!

This spring, Margaret Jenkins hosted an series of intimate conversations with professional dance-makers from around the country, including choreographers Stephen Petronio, Ralph Lemon, Lucinda Childs, and upcoming on May 19th, Doug Varone. Excerpts from past Leaders events are now available online and on our website! To view each video, click on the thumbnail below.

Stephen Petronio

Ralph Lemon

Lucinda Childs

Now in its third year, “Leaders at the Lab: Conversations with Working Artists” has featured several artists performing in the Bay Area as part of the 2011 San Francisco Performances’ James C. Hormel and Michael P. Nguyen Dance Series. The 2011 CHIME Across Borders Chair, Ralph Lemon, has also participated in this free and public series. For more information on this year’s final Leaders at the Lab event with Doug Varone, click here.

“Learning to Fly” with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company

Margaret Jenkins’ personal journals from the Asia Tour of Other Suns reveal the triumphs and trials of the MJDC’s final journey to China last January.

January 6, 2011, First Performance on Tour – University of Shantou in Shantou, China

This curiously fraught evening was at once wondrous and sad—the absence of a dancer at odds with the glory of the moments everyone experienced, in doing what we had come to do: the MJDC in China, to share Other Suns with our other ‘sun.’ One of the dancers became very ill in the middle of the night. We spent the day replacing her, we don’t know yet how she is doing. Then another dancer in the middle of Other Suns III was hit by a flying leg … a black eye and broken tooth the result.

It was amazing to experience 1800 people who had never seen modern dance before, rapt in their seats. More than 900 stayed for over an hour to ask wonderfully insightful questions, full of humor and curiosity, gratitude and awe. The Dean of the School said: “It was an honor to have you grace us with the first modern dance to come to China in this way. We have not seen dance like this before and we are humbled by its virtuosity and importance.”

One audience member asked us what the piece was about, saying he had never seen dance, and then proceeded to tell us eloquently about the work and what he saw, about things being built and then deconstructed. After each answer, the audience would applaud, and of course, there was the translation of the question and the answer, as the dancers from both companies hovered to hear what the others had said in their language.

No wonder the Q&A went on for over an hour. The audience would have stayed for longer if not stopped. The last person asked each dancer to summarize their experience in one sentence. It was so touching to hear the Chinese dancers talk about how their lives have been changed, how they learned to pay attention, to be present, to trust, and how this was as close to learning to fly as they thought they might get.

For more of Margaret’s journal entries from China, click here.