Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Margaret Jenkins
Margaret Jenkins  is a choreographer, teacher and mentor to many young artists as well as a designer of unique community-based dance projects.  Jenkins began her early training in San Francisco. In the sixties, she moved to New York to study at Juilliard, continued her training at UCLA and returned to New York to dance in the companies of Jack Moore, Viola Farber, Judy Dunn, James Cunningham, Gus Solomons and Twyla Tharp. Jenkins was a member of the faculty of the Merce Cunningham Studio and often restaged his works for companies in Europe and the United States.

In 1970, Jenkins returned to San Francisco and formed her own company. She also opened one of the West Coast's first studio-performing spaces at 2005 Bryant Street, a school for the training of professional modern dancers. Viola Farber and Merce Cunningham were frequent guests, and dozens of young choreographers had the chance to experiment and show their early work. This San Francisco rehearsal and performance space also became the “stage” for Jenkins and her Company as well as a model for subsequent performance spaces in San Francisco.

Jenkins has created an impressive body of work, with over 75 works created on her Company as well as resident companies in the United States and Europe. In addition, she has received numerous commissions from renowned national and international arts presenters and cultural institutions, including a commission for the San Francisco Ballet’s 75th anniversary home season, as well as work for the Oakland Ballet, Repertory Dance Theatre in Salt Lake City, National Dance Project, YBCA, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, Montclair State University, Columbia College in Chicago, Cullberg Ballet of Sweden and Ginko of Tokyo, Japan. Jenkins’ career has also embraced a commitment to training the professional dancer. Over the last forty-five years she has taught at major universities and colleges in this country and abroad.

In spring of 2003 Jenkins celebrated the 30th anniversary of her Company with a unique season of performances and exhibitions at Fort Mason’s Herbst Pavilion, for which she was presented with a special Isadora Duncan Dance Award. She was a founding member of the Bay Area Dance Coalition and of Dance/USA, serving on its first board of directors. She currently sits on the board of directors for the YBCA, and remains an active participant in panels across the United States.

In 2004, Jenkins and her company launched a new program, Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME).  Now in its 7th year in the San Francisco Bay Area and its third year in Southern California, the notion behind this artist mentorship program is to foster creative exchange and long-term relationships between emerging and established choreographers, and to create an arena for continuing education for choreography outside of the academic environment. When CHIME launched so did the opening of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab, a studio with a focus on rehearsals, research and development. In 2010, CHIME expanded to include a cross-national mentorship program, CHIME Across Borders.

Jenkins is a founding member with The Center for Creative Research (CCR) based in New York, which is a collection of eleven senior choreographers who have come together under the leadership of Sam Miller and Dana Whitco. CCR was initiated in 2005 as a multi-year project (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by NEFA, now housed at NYU), designed to re-engineer institutional contexts for artists.

Highlights of Jenkins’ activities have included a residency in Kolkata, India (2003) to create a new dance at the Ananda Shankar Center for Performing Arts: the premiere of a site-specific work, Danger Orange (2004) in the landmark Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco; a three-week teaching residency in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Beijing, China (2004); the premiere of running with the land (2005) at the opening of the de Young Museum in the Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden, commissioned by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation; and a four-week rehearsal and performance residency to develop source material for the evening-length piece, A Slipping Glimpse (2006). In 2007, Jenkins and her company performed in a poetry and dance festival in Tokyo, Japan, conducted a five-city domestic tour of A Slipping Glimpse, and presented the initial segment of Other Suns, the first part of new trilogy of work inspired by her 2004 workshops in China. The complete Other Suns trilogy had its world premiere in September 2009 at YBCA, followed by a highly successful four-week tour in the US. Highlights of 2010 include the international premiere and Asia tour of Other Suns in China, and a preview of Light Moves, Jenkins next work with multi-media artist Naomie Kremer.  Light Moves will premiere in San Francisco in November 2011 and will tour the US in early 2012.

For her unique artistic vision, Jenkins has received numerous commissions and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Irvine Fellowship in Dance, the San Francisco Arts Commission Award of Honor, three Isadora Duncan Awards and the Bernard Osher Cultural Award.  www.mjdc.org

Naomie Kremer
Naomie Kremer has had numerous solo exhibitions, including, most recently a show of all video-based work at the Knoedler Gallery Project Space in New York City in the fall of 2008. Her work is in many private, public and corporate collections.  Kremer has taught widely, including at California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Art Institute and CSU Hayward.  She has lectured in the US and abroad, including at Oxford University in England and at the Syracuse University program in Florence, Italy. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Art In America, Art News, Tema Celese, and the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art journal. In 2008, Kremer was commissioned to create a video set for the Berkeley Opera's production of Bela Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle.

Kremer's large-scale, intensely colored abstract paintings are built on childhood memories, everyday observations and experiences, and family traditions. Her canvases emit a sense of risky adventure that is made accessible partly through the seductiveness of her colors and touch, and partly by art historical references to abstract expressionism, cubism, Italian futurism and even Bay Area figuration. While the initial effect of Kremer's canvases is one of chaotic color and energetic movement, the paintings are constructed around representational references, albeit oblique. Text, architectural elements, nature and figures are all inscribed beneath the bold brush strokes and bright and startling colors. They are journeys informed by the infinite complexity of being.

In the last few years Kremer has been making computer animations that begin with her finished paintings. The immersive experience of Kremer’s work is like walking into her canvas. Through digital manipulation, the two-dimensional painting is transformed into a three-dimensional animated world, creating a bridge between painting and digital media. Through an extremely innovative process of animation, Kremer deconstructs the layers of her paintings to reveal hundreds of individual elements of color, brush stroke, texture, composition and distinct objects moving through space. Working in both paint and digital media allows her to explore the unique properties of each as well as their relationship to each other.

Since 2008, Kremer has also been making “hybrid paintings” — projecting videos she creates specifically for this purpose on the surface of her paintings, marrying the physical world of canvas and paint with the digital world of video.  The visual enigma which results engages the viewer in the question of what is painted and what is projected, which is in front and which behind, and where, indeed, the “surface” of the object lies. www.naomiekremer.com

Paul Dresher
Paul Dresher is an internationally active composer noted for his ability to integrate diverse musical influences into his own coherent and unique personal style. He pursues many forms of musical expression including experimental opera and music theater, chamber and orchestral composition, live instrumental electro-acoustic music performances, musical instrument invention and scores for theater, dance and film.

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006-07, he has received commissions from the Library of Congress, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival USA, the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony, California EAR Unit, Zeitgeist,  San Francisco Ballet, Walker Arts Center, University of Iowa, Meet the Composer, Seattle Chamber Players, Present Music, San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Chamber Music America, National Flute Association and the American Music Theater Festival. He has performed or had his works performed throughout North America, Asia and Europe at venues including New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Munich State Opera, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, CBC Vancouver Radio Orchestra, the Minnesota Opera, Arts Summit Indonesia ‘95, Festival Interlink in Japan and five New Music America festivals. Dresher has also worked extensively with many choreographers including Margaret Jenkins, Brenda Way/ODC San Francisco, Nancy Karp & Dancers, Wendy Rogers Dance Company and Allyson Green Dance.

In March of 2009 at Stanford University, Dresher premiered Schick Machine, a music theater work performed on a set comprised entirely of invented musical instruments/sound sculptures and created in collaboration with writer/director Rinde Eckert, percussionist/performer Steven Schick and mechanical sound artist Matt Heckert.  In  April 2008 the San Francisco Ballet premiered Dresher orchestral score for  Thread, his collaboration with choreographer Margaret Jenkins, commissioned for the Ballet’s 75th anniversary.  In May 2006 Dresher’s chamber solo chamber opera The Tyrant, for tenor John Duykers, premiered in five performances at Opera Cleveland and has now been produced in Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Chicago, Austin, Berkeley and San Francisco.

Other recently completed projects include the acclaimed score for the Berkeley Repertory Theater’s premiere production of To The Lighthouse, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel by playwright Adele Shank and directed by Les Waters and Snow in June, a collaboration with playwright Charles Mee and director Chen Shi-Zheng, commissioned by the American Repertory Theatre. In November 2004 his contemporary chamber group, the six-member Paul Dresher Ensemble Electro-Acoustic Band, made its Carnegie Hall debut, performing a concert of Dresher’s chamber works as part of the “In Your Ear Festival” curated by John Adams, in conjunction with the New Albion release of Dresher’s CD Cage Machine.

Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Dresher received his BA in Music from UC Berkeley and his MA in Composition from UC San Diego where he studied with Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros and Bernard Rands. He has had a longtime interest in the music of Asia and Africa, studying Ghanaian drumming with C.K. and Kobla Ladzekpo, Hindustani classical music with Nikhil Banerjee as well as Balinese and Javanese music. Recordings of his works are available on the Lovely Music, New World (with Ned Rothenberg), CRI, Music and Arts, 0.0. Discs, BMG/Catalyst, MinMax, Starkland and New Albion labels.  www.dresherensemble.org

Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943. In 1963 he attended the Vancouver Poetry Conference, taking part in three weeks of workshops, readings and discussions. While there, he met Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Clark Coolidge, who each became important influences on the development of Palmer's poetics.

Palmer is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005), which was short-listed for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize; Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001); The Promises of Glass (2000); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998); At Passages (1996); Sun (1988); First Figure (1984); Notes for Echo Lake (1981); Without Music (1977); The Circular Gates (1974); and Blake's Newton (1972). He is also the author of a prose work, The Danish Notebook (Avec Books, 1999).

Palmer has also translated work from French, Russian and Portuguese, and has taken part in collaborations with both painters and dancers. He edited and contributed translations to Nothing The Sun Could Not Explain: Twenty Contemporary Brazilian Poets (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), and Blue Vitriol (Avec Books, 1994), a collection of poetry by Alexei Parshchikov. He also translated Theory of Tables (1994), a book written by Emmanuel Hocquard after translating Palmer's "Baudelaire Series" into French. He has also frequently collaborated with others artists, including the painter Gerhard Richter and the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

Michael Palmer's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He was the recipient of the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco.

The Paul Dresher Ensemble
The Paul Dresher Ensemble commissions, performs and tours a diverse repertory of new chamber works from diverse contemporary composers: produces and tours new opera/music theater compositions; collaborates with a broad range of dance and theater artists and organizations to create and perform new work based in contemporary music; and mounts educational and family programs to introduce its repertory to diverse audiences of all ages.

Formed in 1984, the Ensemble spent its first decade performing experimental theater/opera productions involving Artistic Director Paul Dresher.  The best known is American Trilogy, which encompasses Slow Fire, Power Failure and Pioneer.  Created collaboratively with singer/actor/musician and writer Rinde Eckert, tenor John Duykers and designer/writer/songwriter Terry Allen, The American Trilogy has received over 200 performances worldwide; in 2005 Slow Fire was remounted for a 20th anniversary production that continues to tour.  The Ensemble has a long history of performing live with modern dance with companies such as the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, ODC San Francisco and Allyson Green Dance.

In 1993, to order meet the technological and expressive demands of many contemporary composers, Mr. Dresher formed The Electro-Acoustic Band.  Comprised of six musicians and two sound engineers, the band combines traditional acoustic instruments with the latest advances in live electronic music technology, and is noted for its ability to perform works that have roots in diverse traditions including classical music, rock & roll, jazz and world music.  The Band is often joined by noted soloists such as pianist-composer Terry Riley, cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, violinist David Abel and pianist Lisa Moore.  The Ensemble has commissioned and/or premiered works by composers including John Adams, John Luther Adams, Sam Adams, Mark Applebaum, Dan Becker, Eve Beglarian, Martin Bresnick, Jay Cloidt, Cindy Cox, Alvin Curran, Anthony Davis, Mark Grey, Paul Hanson, Bun Ching Lam, David Lang, Keeril Makan, Steve Mackey, Ingram Marshall, James Mobberley, Gyan Riley, Terry Riley, Roger Reynolds, Neil Rolnick, Carl Stone, Lois Vierk and Randall Woolf.  Upcoming commissions include works from Fred Frith, Sebastian Currier, Jon Russell and Ryan Brown. 

The Ensemble has performed throughout the US and abroad at such venues as the Library of Congress, Spoleto Festival USA, Walker Arts Center, American Music Theater Festival, the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie/Zankel Hall, the Minnesota Opera, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Arts Summit Indonesia '95, Divalo Archa in Prague, Festival Interlink in Japan and dozens of colleges and universities throughout the US.  The Ensemble has been featured in the commercial recordings of composers including Eve Beglarian, Cindy Cox, Jay Cloidt, Alvin Curran, Keeril Makan, Mark Applebaum, Terry Riley, Steve Mackey and Paul Dresher.

In 1993 the Ensemble began producing and performing new opera and music theater by other contemporary composers, staring with Rinde Eckert’s The Gardening of Thomas D.  In 1995 it formed the core  musical group for the world premiere and first tour of the John Adams/Peter Sellars/June Jordan  production I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky.  In 1998, working in collaboration with composer Steve Mackey and librettist Rinde Eckert, the Ensemble produced the highly acclaimed solo opera Ravenshead, a work honored by USA Today as the “Best Opera of ’98”.  In 2000 in collaboration with San Francisco’s ODC Theater, the Ensemble produced Erling Wold's chamber opera A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil and in 2003, in collaboration with San Francisco’s ODC Theater, produced Wold’s  Sub Pontio Pilato. Most recently, in the fall of 2005, the Ensemble premiered and toured Rinde Eckert’s new work Horizon.