Margaret Jenkins is a choreographer and designer of community-based dance projects, receiving numerous commissions and awards for her work. She is a fifth-generation San Franciscan and founder, in 1973, of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, which has toured regularly throughout the United States and abroad. The company was invited by Padma Menon, artistic director of the newly opened Mudra Centre for Dance in Kochi, India, to participate in a four-week rehearsal and performance residency last month. Jenkins' and Menon's companies were joined by two members of the Tanusree Shankar Dance Company from Calcutta. Together they completed a section of a larger work, "A Slipping Glimpse," which will premiere in San Francisco, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in May 2006. Here are Jenkins' impressions of the company's time in India.

Jenkins challenges with collaborative 'Glimpse'

Michael Wade Simpson, Special to The Chronicle

The four Indian dancers Margaret Jenkins invited to appear with her company after a monthlong residency in Kolkata in 2005 may have thought the choreographer was crazy, having them brave the very non-Indian elements Wednesday night and starting the dance outside, in the fog. more