THE GATES (FAR AWAY NEAR)
The introductory section lays out the work’s program. Paul Dresher’s score opens with a crashing chord like a hammer blow, and six dancers dash around the stage, sailing into the air in sudden leaps or rolling quickly to the floor and up again, like a city gone mad. A single dancer (Ellie Klopp) in an upstage spotlit corner moves slowly in place, her head bent meekly as if meditating deeply. When the rest of the dancers slow and gather around her, she breaks out of her trance with a lightning-fast dance that still seems to express her foreboding thoughts.
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When she finishes, a voice-over recites in the cadences of biblical prophecy a verse about “a great wobbling,” whose signs are “the fire beneath the ground,” “the burning of the palace,” “the unaccountable failures of memory,” and the “disruption of migratory patterns.” The verse sets forth the work’s program: “We are called from our scattered provinces to look in at the city / Through its seven gates / To . . . ask the questions, What are / The stories, What is to be done?” The purpose of the dance is nothing less than to examine the state of the commonwealth. It is a mystical work, using a mystic’s method of enumeration–to look at the commonwealth from seven points of view, the seven gates of the city.
Images of redemption woven throughout the work are birds, the only creatures that can find the hidden gates into the city. The last section, the Gate of Birds, is ecstatic; dancers jump lightly into the air in a way that emphasizes flight rather than gravity’s pull. Such a happy ending at first seems strange after the despair of the introduction, but Jenkins explained in a question-and-answer session after the opening-night per- formance that it was the generosity of the dancers–their unusually strong bond–that pulled the work toward its hopeful ending.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Ken Probst.
