Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

Margaret Jenkins Dance Company Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum San Francisco, CA May 17-27, 2006

Almost a year in the making, interpreted by 15 dancers from two countries, A Slipping Glimpse has given Margaret Jenkins, the doyenne of Bay Area modernists, a cross-cultural career triumph that restores movement to the center of the choreographer's creative universe. The trappings for the full-evening piece come from predictable collaborators (most famously, poet Michael Palmer at his most concise), but Jenkins' sojourn last year in Kolkata, India, with the Tanusree Shankar Dance Company has yielded a profoundly original work that provides a disorienting and sensuous experience.

With material generated, shaped, and tweaked over two continents, Jenkins has proposed a choreographic scheme in which everything is allowed and all is configured to provide both a variety of gesture and a sequence of combinations that revel in an unsuspectedly wide range of dynamics. When dancers freeze in their tracks, you can hear their hearts beating, as well as your own. The four dancers invited from India trade in the symmetries of their classical tradition, while melting into the American modernist mode. If it's beautiful, why question the provenance?

Jenkins owes a debt to the concentric circle arrangement of her mentor Merce Cunningham's Ocean. The musicians from the Paul Dresher Ensemble are stationed on both sides of an upstairs balcony. In Alexander V. Nichols' design scheme, dancers often perform on platforms and scaffolding that hug the downstairs walls, while the audience, seated in the round, faces a cunningly lit floor, to which the dancers frequently descend. No perspective on A Slipping Glimpse is authoritative and no one sees everything in the work the first time around. Hence the title: painter Willem de Kooning's definition of reality.

What you do see represents 35 years of pondering the possibilities of a dance language to which everyone can respond. The facture of the piece--the phrases that seem bound by spun steel--impresses as much as the variety of ensembles and the gestural signposts hung on the structure.

However, perfection eludes Jenkins and her sterling company. Dresher's score inclines to the overbearing and overamplified. And Jenkins prefaces the 75-minute opus with an unnecessary 10-minute site-specific sequence of unisons danced outdoors on a concrete platform. The episode begs, even demands, our indulgence in a way this artist has rarely done. See www.mjdc.org.