“Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind.” Alan Bergman
Margaret Jenkins’ “Wheel” comes into existence when eight dancers silently enter the dimly lit, amoeba-shaped dance floor. In breathy, whispering voices, they call in the elements and directions one by one through gestures and sounds. When the invocation is complete, the lights come up with the music of Brazilian body percussionists, “Barbatuques,” who play samba-like, jungle-influenced rhythms by tapping, slapping, clapping their bodies as an instrument. Dancers break into the tribal beat driven by conga drums, Brazilian vocals, and mouth harp melodies, that seems to possess and drive their movements as they introduce the Wheel of Wind.
In sheer white dresses—suggesting veils, thin layers of perception with passionate red cording and side pleats (Mary Domenico, costume design), dancers propel through the “Wheel of Winds” in dazzling momentum and repelling combinations. From this centrifugal force, dancers are pulled off the lit floor through exits among the surrounding audience at different rates, speeds, and times, or are pulled, as if by gravity, back into the dance, a choreography constantly changing and unpredictable like the wind.
The mirror-like surface of the oval-shaped dance floor functions as a set and a screen, with a relationship to groups of rectangular flags that hang high above the floor at cardinal points. The flags catch the same organic projections—tree limbs, perhaps nerves, or a mycelium that counter the floor’s surface. A floor that initially looked like orange magma breaking through the earth’s surface, that changes into cloud-like patterns or nearly disappears when colored lights change overhead. These visual elements are the sophisticated results of Jack Beuttler’s production design, which affects how the audience sits around the floor, intimate in proximity to the dancers. This relationship allows the audience to feel the dance as much as watch it. We are swept away through six different wheels—”Wheel of Wind,” “Wheel of Constellations,” “Wheel of Rupture,” “Wheel of Memory,” “Wheel of Kites,” and “Wheel of Currents,” emotionally, naturally, feeling like an active part of the dance and its tumbling trajectory.
Focusing on any one spoke of the “Wheel”—the music, production design, choreography, costuming, text…will each lead to the essence of the Wheel. Each spoke in terms of long-time collaborators, and the six phases of the dance’s structure are complete within themselves. The perfect collaboration. A circle held by Jenkins’ electrical current. Paul Dresher and Joel Davel play live music so in tune with dancers that they seem to take their cues from them rather than the reverse. They also incorporate recorded music, which adds another texture, especially from such notable composers as neoclassical, Polish composer, Hania Rani, and Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla, who seduces dancers and audience into another realm with the charango, an Andean string instrument in the Wheel of Kites.
Distinguishing between the different wheels, where one begins, and the other ends, is not as easy as one would imagine, the transitions from one to the next are subtle. Even though there are six distinct narratives, with text by Michael Palmer floating in and out at different points. “Will it end? If so when? Will we resist? What world is this? I wonder where, where we are. I wonder what, what is, what was. I wonder whether…Blood moon rising, was it that?” Solos are fleeting. They create a pause, a necessary relief, a reflection in the spinning of the full company who move and face every direction, including upward, not only in lifts but also through movement as if, like in the “Wheel of Rapture,” they are swimming in water to the surface or plummeting downward to touch the earth.
As if even possible, momentum builds again to another level by the final segment, the “Wheel of Currents,” driven by Dresher’s electrical guitar, with dancers dripping with sweat and glistening to the very end. But first, there is a lull as if the end will come sweetly with a duet before the tribal beat returns, bringing the “Wheel” to its uplifting and triumphant conclusion.
David E. Moreno
