critical response to
Other Suns
…What initially impresses about Margaret Jenkins’ compelling new work is the current of sensuality that simmers on the surface.

if Jenkins’ A Slipping Glimpse, her 2006 project, suggested a major symphony, then, Other Suns brings to mind a carefully incised sonata.

The phrasing is extraordinarily refined; descents seem almost calibrated. There’s a feeling here, too, that the community is our only bulwark against chaos.

Allan Ulrich, Voiceofdance.com

…The forty-minute piece is an astounding work by this gifted, experienced choreographer.

Whether the world ever was in “balance” and whether “symmetries” ever existed is, of course, a question to be debated. But working, as always, collaboratively with her [many] dancers, she translated this conceptual framework into a fiercely visceral piece that felt like one had stepped onto a platform that revolved sometimes at dizzying speeds, sometimes more leisurely.

Jenkins is too subtle an artist to push her piece’s metaphoric content to the surface. Still this is a work that unmistakably examines disruption of order—cosmic, political, social, and personal environmental— and the images just kept popping up. “Suns” is about as close to something like narrative that Jenkins has come with in a long time.

Rita Felciano, San Francisco Bay Guardian

  
  …Jenkin's latest premiere Thursday, "Other Suns," is one brief but packed evening of stunning movement theater. "Other Suns" is the first part of a three-part work that will be presented in its entirety in 2009.

The choreographic result, set to haunting music by Bung-Ching Lam, the bright serialism of Paul Dresher and the stunningly elegant visual design of Alex V. Nichols, takes us on a ride as vertiginous and relentless as it is beautiful. As the piece opens with Nichols' constellation of hanging lights swaying in the theater's breeze, a jangly sculpture jutting through their center, the balances and ruptures to come remain hidden.

But Jenkins has also found a stunning new synthesis here that unites the hectic language of the limbs with morphing group sculptural forms, tied together with her unflinching commitment to beauty.

Anne Murphy, Contra Costa Times