A fifth-generation San Franciscan born into a Jewish political and artistic family, Margaret Jenkins came back to her hometown in the 1970s after a decade of dancing in New York. She describes the scene at the time as a “small family” of dancers.
“It has now really become second only to New York in volume and sheer quality. Any given weekend one could go to four or five events.”
As the scene matured, many Bay Area Jewish choreographers have participated in creating a nationally renowned community of dance. Jenkins estimates there could be as many as 250 dance companies or groups in the Bay Area.
Since the 1970s, the local modern dance scene has exploded. The technicians have become more skilled. The experimentalists have pushed the limits. Funders have focused on supporting the local groups.
And recent grads and dance hopefuls have flocked to the Bay Area.
“Lots of young people, always the ground rock of developing artistic culture, are questioning if New York is really the place they want to live, or if they want a place more hospitable, with clean air,” Jenkins says with a laugh.
Jenkins is currently working on “A Slipping Glimpse” to premiere May 2006 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The piece is inspired by a quote from artist Willem de Kooning: “Reality is but a slipping glimpse.” Jenkins will explore the relationship between “the reality presented by those of the state and the reality of the individual.”
Jenkins describes what she’s learned about process: “You start one place and then you end up in another place. There are always surprises along the way.”
While there has never been explicit Jewish content in Jenkins’ work, her Jewish upbringing informs her approach to art.
“There is great respect in Judaism for intellectual activities. We are the People of the Book. Intellectual exploration is at the root of my work.”
Liss Fain agrees. “Dance isn’t just entertainment. It is intellectual probing.”
From a tight-knit Jewish community in Rhode Island, Fain began dancing in high school — late for a dancer. As a sophomore in college, Fain dropped out and moved to New York to dance.
“It was awful for my family. They were totally traumatized. They were so focused on education and I was an excellent student.”
But Fain just wanted to dance. She auditioned for Twyla Tharp and got in. Her dance career took her from Austin to Boston and eventually to the Bay Area.
“I loved living in San Francisco,” says Fain who now lives in Marin County. “The dance community is much bigger and more diverse, open to a huge variety of styles and dance forms. It made Boston feel stifling.”
She really began to pull her career together in 1999 when she started intense collaborations with other artists and incorporating streaming media into her work.
Nancy Karp, by contrast, has been dancing since the age of 6. She grew up in a secular family in Los Angeles that valued the arts.
Since the 1970s when she started her Bay Area dance company, her interdisciplinary style has become more elaborate as her network of dancers, visual artists, composers and costume designers becomes more complex.
Inspired by a radio commission the Berlin-based composer Alvin Curran produced for the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Karp created a major work of dance on the subject in the 1990s. She spent almost a full year researching Kristallnacht, reading oral histories and visiting museums. She worked with photographic images of people from the time to develop movement and gesture.
The 54-year-old from Emeryville is currently working on a piece entitled “Lava,” inspired by her many trips to Sicily and witnessing the explosion of Mount Aetna. “Lava” will premiere at her company’s 25th anniversary celebration.
Another Jewish choreographer, Nina Haft is currently working under the guidance of Karp at the Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab on “Mitabing, Mitabang!” which tells the story of the daughter of a Jewish gangster in Las Vegas in the 1950s.
At 42, Haft recalls the joy of performing “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” in Yiddish at a Yiddish theater camp she attended as a teenager.
“In retrospect my sense of myself as an artist is linked to camp,” she said.
In 1984 Haft joined the Bay Area dance scene, and since then she’s created several works directly informed by her Jewish background.
“Minyan” was born from her research on religious rituals, from lighting the Sabbath candles to ritual purity. The piece has been performed several times in different venues including Temple Sinai in Oakland.
Other pieces include the evening-length “Making of Americans,” an exploration into the Jewish writer Gertrude Stein and historic research at the turn of the last century, and a solo about union and love from a Jewish’s woman’s perspective.