The Big Question: Why?
By Emmaly Wiederholt
When I was a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, I asked choreographer and faculty member Alex Ketley, “Why should I go through all this?” It was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek question, I’ll admit, because I wasn’t unmotivated to work hard. I simply couldn’t figure out why I felt so compelled to go through such a grueling practice for so little pay off. And Alex didn’t have an answer for me. In fact, it turned into a joke. He’d say my question haunted him like a ghost. Eventually I had to let the question go. For whatever reason, I still felt incredibly compelled to work hard and continue to dance, and so did everyone around me, so it hardly seemed worth the energy fretting over why.
That is, at least, until I saw “Instrument.” Monique Jenkinson’s newest solo work, “Instrument,” (at CounterPULSE November 29- December 9) looked at dance in and on her body. In residence at the de Young Museum, Jenkinson used the current exhibit “Rudolph Nureyev: A Life In Dance” as a point of departure. Jenkinson came from a dance training steeped in ballet, and in conjunction with the Nureyev exhibit, “Instrument” was a refraction of her ballet training and her dance history from her current early-forties perspective.
It started with her doing ballet exercises. Pirouettes, tendus, chaine turns. She wasn’t stellar at them, but the audience understood it was beside the point whether or not she was good at ballet (for the record though, she wasn’t bad). Ballet is unfortunately one of those things that is monopolized by young thin bodies (also for the record, she wasn’t overweight). As Jenkinson continued through the piece, taking off her warm-ups to the point where she was only in a leotard, I began to question why she was doing this. In fact I wrote in my notes: “doesn’t have to do this- get up in front of everyone in just a leotard and do ballet.” Jenkinson, a stunning, compelling, and incredibly enticing performer, has met her fair amount of success. This felt almost masochistic. Why was she putting herself through this?
And then she recounted her experience seeing Nureyev perform at the end of his career. She found the experience incredibly underwhelming. He’d looked sickly, and apparently he hadn’t performed all that well. She remembered thinking, “Why are you putting us through this? Why are you putting yourself through this?” And then she said, “Twenty-two years later I would ask the same questions but now I would know why.” I was thunder struck. I had just basically written down “why is she doing this” on my notepad. And yet she seemed to be posing the question to me.
I don’t understand why Jenkinson performed “Instrument,” though it was powerful, grueling, and poignant. More importantly, though, it was incredibly courageous. There are many reasons why people perform, but I suspect every performer I’ve ever seen has some element of wanting to showcase their skills. And really, it takes very little courage to do what one is good at. I saw the SF Opera perform “Tosca” the other night, and while I was inspired and impressed by the singers’ abilities, I would not label their performance as courageous for the mere fact that they were brilliant and they knew it.
But getting up in front of an audience and doing something one is not necessarily going to be brilliant at takes a different kind of guts than just facing stage fright. And it poses the question “why” so glaringly: why was Jenkinson onstage putting herself through what she was putting herself through? I don’t know, though I’m thankful she did. I hope one day I’ll know.
Pictured: Monique Jenkinson, photo by Michelle Blioux