MARGARET JENKINS DANCE COMPANY
Shelf Life is a literary rather than a literal dance. It begins with six still dancers–Bryan Chalfant, Janice Dulak, Wayne Hazzard, Ellie Klopp, Anne Krauss, and Jesse Traschen–splayed across the stage in a long diagonal, illuminated by a rectangle of harsh white light. Sandra Woodall’s costumes are slashed and jagged layers of off-white–leggings, skirts, trousers, tunics–printed with streaks of color and bands of print reminiscent of newspapers, flour sacks, and grocery-store bar codes. Clearly they refer to one possible meaning of “shelf life.”
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When we’ve had just a minute to ponder that possibility, the narrator, Rinde Eckert, appears wearing a shrunken tuxedo and ruminates upon the contents of his bookshelf: Why are these six paperbacks arranged this way? By accident? By design? Will their stories run together like the colors of new clothes in the washer? References to these six novels pepper the text of Shelf Life: the six novels sitting in newsstands in truck stops across the country, sitting on the front seat of the narrator’s car, sitting on the narrator’s bookshelf, the novels’ characters, their dialogue. The novels relate to one another as images do in certain poems: simple juxtaposition allows readers and audiences to make as many–or as few–connections as they wish.
In a very real sense, these six stories are simply beside the point. Everything that matters is right there onstage: the crisp beauty of the movement, the exhilarating quality of the dancing, the intriguing drama of this curious narrator. Jenkins’s movement style is clean, unfussy, asymmetrical. Her dancers routinely perform the impossible–walking on air, plummeting from astonishing heights, creating unfathomable shapes in their lifts and leaps–as if it were as simple as walking to the bus stop. Because all the company’s men and women are equally strong and grounded and graceful and ethereal, their partnering transcends cliched gender roles. Beautiful dancing, pure and simple.
