With roots in the styles of Twyla Tharp and Merce Cunningham, San Francisco choreographer Margaret Jenkins established herself as a benevolent earth mother overlooking the Bay City's vibrant dance scene over the past 35 years.

Over the past decade, however, the 65-year-old dance maker became interested in stretching those boundaries by concentrating on cross-cultural work. "I was very interested in being in the world in a different way," Jenkins smoothly remarks over the phone last week.

So she made forays to the East in India and Japan. Then in 2004, Jenkins was invited to China to teach a trio of modern dance groups there. While working with them, she proposed to see "if there was an affinity between me and one of the companies."

Guangdong Modern Dance Company had that kind of magnetism for her. Located in the province of Guangdong in the southern part of China that surrounds Hong Kong, it is the country's oldest professional modern dance ensemble.

But cross-cultural collaborations, especially those that bridge continents, are very complicated. When Jenkins returned to San Francisco, she began to investigate sources of financial support and received enough from individuals and foundations to get the project started.

Jenkins was able to create the first section of a trilogy, called "Other Suns," with her own dancers, which premiered in 2007. She then took her whole company to the province capital of Guangzhou, where the Chinese group resides, to live and work with the dancers for six weeks.

There they created the third part of the trilogy. Jenkins stresses that, although she was the primary creative artist, all of the dancers were "very immersed and intricately involved in developing the movement material."

They focused on ideas of symmetry and asymmetry, balance and fragility -- none of them easy thoughts to convey when speaking through interpreters. But Jenkins feels "it enriched the experience because we had to work so deeply and so conscientiously to make sure we were understood."

The artists also read the poetry of Bei Dao, once considered a dissident and expelled from China. Now Dao is back there and a highly respected international figure who has been often nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"He spoke in subtle ways to politics, but was also rich in imagery," explains Jenkins. "I was interested in having them respond to that imagery because it felt like it was a part of who they were and came from their lives, not just Western ideas."

Jenkins is careful to emphasize that she doesn't go into cross-cultural projects "thinking that I have something to offer -- I go into them thinking that I have a lot to learn. It isn't that I can't wait to go and teach them. It's that I can't wait to learn what I don't know."

That didn't simply mean a visit to the Great Wall or the Forbidden City, but living in that world and becoming "a participant. The mass of people that was everywhere was just extraordinary," she notes, although Guangdong province is now China's most populous and fastest-growing economy. "Yet the desire to be so deeply entrenched in Western culture was a surprise -- everyone dressed as they do here in America, unlike India where it was clear every minute of every day who was Indian and who was not."

Jenkins acknowledges that modern dance is young and hungry -- the Guangdong group only began in 1992. "I think that the work I'm seeing is now where dance here was 30 years ago." But she thinks "the field of modern dance is going to explode in the next 10 years in dance terms of flow and physicalizing ideas that just aren't about propaganda but are about what you're feeling or wondering about or have experienced."

Already the Guangdong dancers have responded with the second part of the trilogy, which was created last by deputy artistic director Liu Qi in response to their experience with the Americans.

The process is still ongoing as they tour the United States. "In my wildest dreams I didn't think it would be as fluid and profound as it has turned out to be," says Jenkins. "I'm still surprised by the depth of the relationships that have developed between my company and the Chinese. They get deeper and deeper as we spend more time together."

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