What's in Susan Marshall's big tent?

Susan Marshall & Company in Sawdust Palace (Photo: Rosalie O'Connor)

Since forming in 1985, Susan Marshall & Company has garnered a whopping ten Bessie Awards. Marshall herself, a much sought-after dance maker on the US and international scene, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. So, fair to say, if you're given a chance to gain insight into this artist's creative process, that's a pretty good deal, right? 92Y's Harkness Dance Festival has a pretty good deal for you, coming up next weekend.

Invited by 2012 curator Doug Varone, Marshall immediately took to the festival's theme, "Stripped/Dressed," which refers to a two-part program. The first part gives the audience an interesting peek behind the choreographic curtain; the second presents fully-produced work.

"I'm approaching this as an opportunity to bring the process out into the open," says Marshall. "We'll dissect a couple of the sections that we'll present later."

She also hopes to show a work-in-progress--"fresh off the presses," she says, although conceptualized several years ago. "Since I'm in the middle of making it, I can remember what I was thinking!"

And it's quite something to remember, as the choreographer explains. "It involves an apparatus, a structure, that would allow the performer to--and this is the strange part--make her breasts move up and down."

She continues, chuckling, "I've become interested in the way the object takes a passive part of the body and gives it agency, and how it's very disorienting to actually see this part of the body dancing of its own volition!"

"I intend the work to be subversive," Marshall says, "And yet it's very hard to approach this sexual, female body in any way that hasn't already been exploited, in a way that doesn't fall into a trope of what's already out there--victim or seductress. It's like walking in a mine field.

"The sexuality is undermined by the humor and even by the ugly bizarreness of it--which I think might be a way forward. I'm very much looking forward to the audience response. I may not succeed, and I think feels like a very comfortable and safe place to have that discussion, to hear what the audience's response is to the work at this stage."

Susan Marshall and Dancers in Sawdust Palace (Photos: Rosalie O'Connor)

In 2007, she premiered Sawdust Palace, a Bard College commission in celebration of British composer Edward Elgar. The piece was created for a Spiegeltent, a portable dance hall. Marshall will revive Sawdust Palace for 92Y's Buttenweiser Hall.

"Elgar crossed the line between low and high art and created music for the dance hall. This caused problems for him in his own lifetime in terms of respectability, being taken seriously. In its time, the 19th Century, a Spiegeltent was used as a dance hall. Now, it's used for intimate circuses or Party Central for festivals or club space. So it has all these connotations, and we just went for it and decided to embrace them all.

"In the Spiegeltent, you have a bar, you have cabaret tables, and that sort of thing. The piece would not work as a stage work; that would be the wrong frame. So, we are transforming Buttenweiser Hall into a very informal theater-in-the- round."

"We have scarf dances. We have burlesque. We have specialty acts that I will leave to the imagination," Marshall says with another chuckle.

Not left to the imagination is anything having to do with creative collaboration. Marshall enjoys sharing what she has learned in years of working closely with her dancers. She's currently preparing for her annual SUMAC program--a play on the company's name and the anagram for Systems for Understanding Movement and Choreography--which will be held at Barnard College, June 11-16.

"It's built off a lot of the systems that we use as a company, but we incorporate
other approaches that we've learned from other choreographers. Many dance artists now work collaboratively and expect that kind of creative exchange with their dancers. We wanted to make sure that dancers have a place to practice that and have the tools and feel empowered to face the demands they may encounter. We wanted to help choreographers use the minds and bodies in the room more fully, and to help them to break out of their stuck places.

"We don't make it open to the public. It's a vulnerable space, and it's a very safe space."

Click here for application information for Marshall's Summer 2012 SUMAC program. (deadline: April 1)

See Susan Marshall & Company at 92Y's Harkness Dance Festival--Friday and Saturday, March 16-17 at 8pm and Sunday, March 18 at 3pm. For ticket information and purchase, click here or call 212-415-5500.

92Y
1395 Lexington Avenue (92nd Street), Manhattan
(directions)

Contractual dust-up

Contract Disputes in Dance - Pavel Zustiak and the 92nd Street Y
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, May 8, 2009

Zuŝtiak: at home in the funhouse

Lindsey Dietz Marchant (left) and Elena Demyanenko

of Pavel Zuŝtiak/Palissimo
in Zuŝtiak's Weddings and Beheadings
(Photo: Julie Lemberger for the 92nd Street Y)

You're already a habitant of Pavel Zuŝtiak's Mardi Gras funhouse. By the time his new work--Weddings and Beheadings--reveals its solemn, surprise ending, you probably won't need that fact to be made plain. You're human, he's had his eyes on you, and you can feel it.

In this sprawling, 80-minute piece, Zuŝtiak animates a yin/yang of male and female, light and darkness, grace and awkwardness, tenderness and aggression, pleasure and fear, the theatrical and the genuine, the clothed and the unclothed, the corporeal and the ghostly, presence and absence, present and past. The way in which yin slips around the base of yang, the way they swirl together and lock into one entity, reflects how this dance-theater work presents a startling palette of opposites.

Shifting, evolving images--some very old found portrait photos, shots of the dancers and x-rays--are projected onto a scrim, the backdrop and other surfaces. The performers--when not stark, raving nude, which is often--make numerous costume and identity changes. Joe Levasseur's lighting environment creates alternating and disturbing feelings of intimacy and distance, the mysterious and the mundane. Zuŝtiak's sound design marches against the ear and nerves. Some action strays into the margins of the stage, and we follow, sneaking peeks there before returning our gaze to the main event.

Sho Ikushima (left) and Jeff Kent Jacobs
(Photo: Julie Lemberger for the 92nd Street Y)

Elena Demyanenko, Sho Ikushima, Jeff Kent Jacobs and Lindsey Dietz Marchant--an amazing cast--help pull together this jumble of theatrical elements, this ambiguity of mood, motion and meaning. Watch, especially, for smoothly-rendered duets between the men and for the way that Dietz Marchant always appears to be suspended in dark space, even when there's light all around her, straining against balance, active and complex within her waiting.

Zuŝtiak's other fine collaborators include Robert Flynt (projections concept and images); Keith Skretch (projections design and animation) and Nick Vaughn (set and costumes).

A presentation of the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, Weddings and Beheadings continues its run Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm at the Ailey Citigroup Theater at the Joan Weill Center for Dance, 405 West 55th Street at 9th Avenue.

Click here for ticketing information.

Out of Israel

92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival at The Ailey Citigroup Theater. Whew! When I was writing those damned "Footnotes" for The Village Voice, that would have taken up just about all of my word allotment! (Glad that's over!) Here are a few more words to throw into that mix: LeeSaar The Company & Netta Yerushalmy: Out of Israel. One work apiece by young Israeli choreographers of note.

Bilocale--come close please...,Yerushalmy's duet with choreographic collaborator Toni Melaas, benefits from the intimate arrangement of its audience around the edges of the theater's performance space. We feel the energy of the two women as they bound towards us or when one paints the other's back in slashes or dots of scarlet and slams her down onto a sheet of paper--surely an alarming form of printmaking. Over 25 minutes, the movement involves quirky, rubbery effects and various clinches and entanglements, suggesting volatile inner states and external connections. Boundaries will be violated. There will be blood.

For Geisha--presented by writer/actress Lee Sher and dancer-choreographer Saar Harari
--the audience is returned to conventional theater seating. There's no formal intermission between the companies--just a pause while our folding chairs are removed from the performing space. Keeping the audience seated that long doesn't work to the advantage of a piece that might be too long anyway. But Geisha has extraordinarily confident solo turns by Jye-Hwei Lin--topless in jeans and full of vivid, cinematic characters--who also duets with the always provocative and brooding (and identically-attired) Harari. Sher wears a kimono-like robe in her interspersed solos. Resembling a cross between Carrie Fisher and Celine Dion, she lipsyncs a couple of Israeli pop songs, regarding us with oodles of saccharine "sincerity" and strolling past the front row, grabbing our hands. Sher's tackiness stands in contrast to her equally showy yet cool and really out there colleagues. The lighting by Joe Levasseur on bare flesh is--no big surprise--terrific.

Out of Israel runs through Sunday afternoon, March 9. The festival continues through March 16. For a schedule and ticketing information, click here or call 212-415-5552.