The Unbearable Weight of Impermanence
Margaret Jenkins Dance Company
"Breathing at the Boundaries"
December 29, 2020
on YouTube
The last few months, looking at one more piece of choreography on screen made me wonder whether it might not be preferable to wait till the dancers could come back for live audiences. With few exceptions, despite honest efforts, the screen had offered few encouraging examples of vivid imaginations getting a handle on dance on screen. With “Cooped” Jamar Roberts created one of those outliers. That short solo communicated power and fragmentation but stirred the soul. But just before the end of the depressing 2020, on December 26, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company defied the odds with an original full evening, multi-cast screen dance. Its truth resonated way beyond its fifty-five minutes.
“Breathing at the Boundaries” is a multi-level meditation on, maybe, who we are. It showcased her own and other dancers with a slew of Jenkins' long-time collaborators, foremost among them the brilliant Alexander Nichols as Visual Director and Cinematographer and Paul Dresher, the musician/composer. Welcome also was the return of Rinde Eckert as a garbage man, his booming baritone resonating about the detritus his broom keeps sweeping up.
With “Breathing” Jenkins created a haunting dance theater piece that looks at the human body as shape shifting as a natural process in time and space. Nothing, Jenkins says, is permanent but it’s only the camera that can create a sense of a fluid reality -- whether present or remembered.
The performers are magnified with partial views, let’s say of a face, or two pairs of giant interlocking legs. We see them alone as or as multiple units of themselves, disappearing into a black space, only to pop up again. Some gestures -- scooping arms in particular -- appear again and again.
It’s to Jenkins’ and her collaborators immense credit that “Breathing” dives deeply into what is possible with sound and images. Eckert’s and Michael Palmer’s verbal musings served as periodic guideposts through these wanderings, but I am not certain that they measurably enhanced what the music and the visual imagery did so beautifully.
In an early duet, Chinchi Hui and Dalton Alexander circle around in each other in different universes. She seems outside on a rooftop, he looks at her through the windows in a studio, and we look at them through a screen. It’s this triple perspective that makes “Breathing” so fascinating.
Alex Carrington’s searching solo turned into sextet with Dalton Alexander and Eckert, their dancing bodies disappearing into, perhaps, memories. Midway through “Breathing” a gaunt Jenkins appeared in a cameo. In an empty alley of ancient walls, she seemed to search of something intangible, yet perhaps, still existing.
Indian dancer Joyita Pal and Yahui Lui from China shadowed Crystal Dawn’s solo. In one breath-taking moment Pal and Dawn embodied Indian and European classicism as a universal concept. Yet this luminous trio paled against the fierceness of Ashley Bathgate’s cello.
One odd solo left me puzzled. A single dancer in black, huddled in an open-faced box, appeared to attempt an escape yet also cowered in a corner. Was she imprisoned? By her own choice? The space looked like a tiny theater.
A charming double duet for Norma Fong and Corey Brady took place within their individual frame. They nevertheless danced for and with each other. Leading up to the end, in Dalton’s duet with a larger than human Indranil Ghosh, he seemed to reach for the impossible. He finally let go of his clenched fists and sank into the floor.
For the final image, to Dresher’s gentle music, each of the Jenkins’ dancers appears in an individual window. Vibrantly alive, they still look the saints in their niches on the outside of European cathedrals.
“Breathing” is available on YouTube through January 6.
copyright © 2020 by Rita Felciano
