MARGARET JENKINS AND RINDE ECKERT
Jenkins is a dancer and choreographer, Eckert a writer, singer, composer, and actor. Judging from the works on this program, Eckert is the more flamboyant talent, Jenkins a restraining force. The opening work, And So They (1988), has an almost British reserve–the voice-over, written by Eckert, is read by a woman with an English accent, and text and choreography both stress disjunction, disaffection, the expression of feeling through locutions so oblique that the feeling almost gets lost. The text traces, through single-sentence snippets of talk between a man and a woman, the formation and dissolution of a marriage. Jenkins’s minimalist choreography (which she and Eckert perform) is repetitive, small, almost machinelike–rocking back and forth from foot to foot, for instance–punctuated by significant looks at each other or at the floor or off to the side. And So They is a chilly work, uncomfortable to watch–as undoubtedly it was meant to be.
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Still, I found Shorebirds Atlantic (1988) a more successful, more passionate collaboration: performed once again by Jenkins and Eckert, with her choreography and his text and score, it’s a piece about a man and woman who meet in a bar in Atlantic City. He confides that he has a degenerative disease; he wants her to collaborate in his suicide by going with him to the beach and watching him wade out and sink. Several lines of the text seem to offer clues to the actual collaboration between Eckert and Jenkins: “I see her as a flock of swifts or sparrows, myself a great rudeness at its edge.” The text calls the Atlantic City couple “associated and aloof.” They accuse each other–one makes a law of his pain, the other a virtue of her fear.
Jenkins likes to show two dancers whose movements echo without mirroring each other: in Shorebirds Atlantic, for instance, Eckert holds a finger up just before Jenkins shoots her whole arm up. You can see the same pattern in her Miss Jacobi Weeps (1989), danced by Ellie Klopp and Jesse Traschen: facing us, Klopp bends her arms at the elbow and sends them away from her, palms up; Traschen does the same, but he stands with his back to us and holds his arms behind him. So it’s not surprising that in Jenkins’s Steps Midway (1988), which I take to be a very personal dance of self-assessment, she uses five fun-house mirrors that distort the movements she performs.
Dryland Divine has plenty of verbal and visual wit. When Eckert’s persona describes how he hit his brother with a Bible, he reports that he, the murderer, screamed: “You already know how it ends!” He switches wires through the air to produce a kind of singing or holds them in a cross or massages them into a hard-on; they “turn into” a length of metal pipe that Eckert plays like a flute or babbles into as if it were a preacher’s microphone. The rich, interwoven textures of this piece, which inhabit so many levels, allow a glimpse into this everyman’s search for his own salvation, his own grace, represented here, as it is traditionally, by water. Eckert says at one point, “The art of dowsing is the art of surrender. . . . You’re standing in the goddamn river!”
