Noted nationwide as one of the foremost proponents of a fully realized, collaborative art, choreographer Margaret Jenkins creates works in intimate collaboration with her dancers that are at once physically rigorous, intellectually and philosophically demanding, and always imbued with observations about the human character. In Light Moves, Jenkins collaborates with her dancers, painter and media artist Naomie Kremer, composer Paul Dresher and poet Michael Palmer to create a unique synthesis of dance, moving images and live music. Now in the second phase of its development during the spring and fall of 2011, Light Moves will premiere on November 3 – 5, 2011 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco.

Light Moves marks the first collaboration between Margaret Jenkins and Naomie Kremer, a critically applauded multi-media artist who was featured on the Apple Pro website for her innovative process of animating her paintings. By digitally deconstructing and animating hundreds of individually selected elements of color, brush stroke, texture and shape moving through space, Kremer transforms a two-dimensional painting into a mysteriously three-dimensional animated world. The experience is like walking into her canvas. Since 2008, Kremer has also been making “hybrid paintings” – projecting videos she creates specifically for this purpose on the surface of her paintings, marrying the physical world of canvas and paint with the digital world of video. The visual enigma which results engages the viewer in the question of what is painted and what is projected, which is in front and which behind, and where, indeed, the “surface” of the object lies.

Light Moves reunites Jenkins with longtime collaborators Paul Dresher, an internationally recognized composer, and Wallace Stevens Award-winning poet Michael Palmer. Paul Dresher’s extraordinary ability to propel and be responsive to movement is singular in his field, and his invented instruments, along with his vast musical vocabulary, contributes to the landscape being developed for this new work. 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.

Jenkins is known for creating work – in collaboration with her dancers – by layering highly physical and gestural movement, disrupting rhythms and shattering spatial planes. There is a fierce and subtle quality to these explorations, with an abundance of information offered through movement, music and spoken text. Inspired by Kremer’s hybrid paintings, Jenkins seeks an analogue for the new work, Light Moves. She asks, “How might dance, music and video projections be amalgamated into a joint identity, in a manner similar to projecting on painting?”

Light Moves uses the natural cycles of light as an organizing device that informs and inspires the arc of the piece. Occurring inside these light cycles are phases of stillness, silence, fullness and commotion found in the interaction of projections, music and dancing. The given cycles include sound and light without dancers, language with or without other elements, the visuals alone, and so on, following a rhythm of alternation. The dancers create their own personal points of reference within the sections: steady, flickering, intense, muted, darting, etc…. Light Moves unfolds as a light-field of shifting emotional character and physical velocity.