Edge Festival.

If you cynically thought that the avant-garde had been reduced to a marketing tool to snare a hip audience, you're wrong. The producers at Dancers' Group/Footwork have managed, once again and with a refreshing degree of sincerity, to find a new angle for their tenth annual Edge Festival, and it's not necessarily the one you'd expect.

Mercy Sidbury, former associate director of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company as well as an independent choreographer, was the 1996 festival's curator. She defined the edge as a paradoxically humane but extreme place of flux, emotive as well as feminine. Even more than past festivals, this one was not only eccentric; it was loving, imaginative, reverential, and full of optimism about dance as a form and about the Bay Area as a serious community of dance artists.

The evening celebrating seventy-five-year-old Anna Halprin had historic weight. Spry and witty Anna (as she is universally known) still moves with impish drama and rhythmic brilliance. As the audience arrived she was already performing her constant-flow movement meditation, developed from the classes of Margaret H'Doubler at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1930s. Bay Area historian (and Dance Magazine critic) Janice Ross, the emcee for the evening, spoke as Anna moved, giving to the meditation, as to the entire evening, a wonderfully firm shape and the right historical grit.

Process is everything to Anna. It's the catalyst of her witty new solo Grandfather Dance; it is the subject examined in her restaged Parades and Changes (1965); and it is the essence of her healing rituals, which seek well-being through personal transformation. While dance-as-process has serious dangers ranging from sentimentality to exhibitionism--and Anna doesn't always avoid them--what remains most prominent is the power and durability of her innovations.

Ruth Zaporah and friends--Leonard Pitt, Rhiannon, and Bob Ernst the night I was there--went to theatrical extremes, and when it worked, they captured the audience in a zany mass hallucination. Using sounds and facial expressions so outlandish one wondered how anyone could ever again seem sedate, Zaporah and her cohorts played a kind of Beckettian improvisational jazz together. Words were shaken loose from their context, thrown to the theatrical winds, and, with intonation and antic gesture, pursued to strange and distant emotional depths. The most hilarious riff entailed Zaporah and Pitt negotiating a relationship. The most poignant had Zaporah and singer Rhiannon side by side on chairs "discussing" their trip to the former Yugoslavia to perform in refugee camps. To express the juxtaposition of the banal and the grotesque they used syncopated and overlapping sentence fragments, words, and potent timing, taking us giddily to the edge where humor and horror meet.

Ellen Bromberg's Singing Myself a Lullaby, which premiered in the area last year, presented dancer John Henry's literal edge--his impending death from AIDS. This is no dance in the traditional sense; there is no fixed object, because each presentation of Singing is altered, ever more radically, first by the subject's deterioration, second by the introduction of documentary footage of earlier performances, and third by paring the material. Bromberg and her collaborators Doug Rosenberg (video), Victor Spiegel (sound), and Jack Carpenter (lights) created a work that is reminiscent of environmental art transformed by weather. Singing will become a fixed artifact only when Henry is a memory.

Margaret Jenkins gave process and catastrophe an intellectual face in an excerpt from a developing work, Fault. Like Merce Cunningham's Arcade, the dance is a moody composition of cantilevers, agglomerations, and ruptures meant to evoke earthquakes and political disintegration. Sara Shelton Mann was ferociously wry in Holding Paradox, a raw and poignant riff on female extremis in which Mann evolved from masculine to feminine, hiking up panty hose and donning a big wig with the wild unself-consciousness of a five-year-old.

If Mann's language was rococo, Maureen Fleming's was bombastic and opaque in Eros, with text by David Henry Hwang. But her butohlike movement evolution was an exquisite essay in slow change. [For more on Fleming, see the following review.] Ending the six-week festival was Rhodessa Jones in her juicy, haunting solo, The Blues Stories. She made her autobiography a skin we could all climb into and experience the terror and awe of a life that's evolved from sharecropper's daughter to hippie-young mother to avant-garde dancer-actress-grandmother. Personal process has never seemed so universal.