MARGARET JENKINS DANCE COMPANY
Celebrating 50 years of bringing dance to San Francisco and the world!
MJDC’s Legacy in Motion project is a comprehensive exploration and orchestration of our 50+ year history, and the impact Jenkins and the company have had on the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, the country, and abroad. Our goal is to offer current and future artists a range of materials that highlight the experiences and insights of Jenkins and the many artists who have intersected with MJDC.
From 2024-2026, MJDC will focus on three interwoven components:
For over 50 years, Jenkins’ has been honing her own deeply collaborative process in the studio. To capture this vibrant part of creation, a documentary film crew will follow the team as they develop a new performance work, Wheel. The resulting feature film will offer a window into this vital period, and deepen insights into the nature of Jenkins’ style of collaboration. It will also draw connections to past projects and Jenkins’ history as an artist, providing students, dance aficionados, and MJDC fans a richer portrait of the artist.
To preserve additional perspectives and stories, MJDC will film and transcribe conversations with over 30 key collaborators, company members, mentees, and peers from the past 50 years, capturing their perspectives on MJDC’s history and its impact on the larger San Francisco dance scene. In addition to making the transcribed conversations publicly available, MJDC will commission a series of essays to synthesize and bring forward key themes from these oral histories.
MJDC's collection of notebooks, photographs, videos, programs, and other archival documentation will soon become part of UC Berkeley Bancroft Library’s Western Americana Collection, joining archival materials related to artists such as Mark Twain, Joan Didion, Ina Coolbrith, and Jack London. The collection will be made publicly available at the Library to support future research on the San Francisco Bay Area’s dance history. The Bancroft Library is one of the largest and most heavily used libraries of manuscripts, rare books, and unique materials in the United States. We believe their stewardship will ensure these materials will be well cared for and fully accessible for generations to come.
Your support will build a lasting legacy for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company
We need your help to raise 2.1 million for the Legacy in Motion project.
Because most of the Legacy in Motion project will be available for free or low-cost to our community (ensuring access to artists and researchers), we must rely on the generosity and incredible support from our individual donors to help make this project a success. Through the incredible generosity of our major donors, we are already making tremendous headway. Your support can help us reach our goal!
These funds will support building a permanent collection of Jenkins’ materials at the prestigious UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, an extensive oral history featuring artists from the Bay Area and beyond, the creation of a new performance work (Wheel), and a feature-length documentary on Jenkins’ process.
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Mail a check to:
Margaret Jenkins Dance Company
3973 25th Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
