Marshall's cabaret: Siobhan Burke peeks inside the tent

Susan Marshall's Cerebral Cabaret
by Siobhan Burke, Dance Magazine, March 21, 2012

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)

She moves in mysterious ways

It's the 25th Anniversary for Susan Marshall & Company, although this enterprise, with its androgynous, unassuming sensuousness and democratic playfulness, looks grounded in values reaching back an additional twenty years.

For this season, Marshall presents one suite of related, interconnected video/dance installations and one ensemble piece from repertory, each presentation set up in its own theater at Baryshnikov Arts Center--Frame Dances, from 2006 and 2008, in the Howard Gilman Performance Space, and Adamantine, debuted in 2009 but making its New York premiere, in the Jerome Robbins Theater.

Audiences can choose to take in Frame Dances at 7pm or wait until it repeats at 9:15 after Adamantine's 8pm showing. If you want to try for tickets for this evening, the final performance, I'd recommend seeing Frame Dances at 7. For the Marshall-initiated, this suite offers a snack box of delights--just enough for one night. For newcomers, it's an appetizer, introducing all things Marshall and her lovely and hardworking company. Adamantine's hour, unfortunately, mostly passes with heavy emphasis on sound and the weight of the world and time. It has pleasures in the dancing, but its artifice seems forced, even awkward at times.

Frame Dances plays out of multiple frames--a dancer-framing sandbox framed by metal mesh and more wood; a rectangle of Astroturf and other fake greenery topped with an open framework of wood like a bridge's arch; a cable and harness for aerial work, encased in transparent vinyl; the video projection frames that permit audience members to watch from seats or drift to wherever they can catch all the action; and even the Gilman space itself, with its small chunks of seating and its fluid space for movement. A more encompassing, philosophical frame might involve the juxtaposition of humans with the artificial (plastic, say, or mechanically-assisted flight) or things appropriated from nature (sand filling a box).

In each instance, the humans make the best of things. In Frame Dances, the video of Frame Dance (excerpted from the 2006 Cloudless--are you keeping up with me?), five dancers make like newborn puppies huddled in light sleep, limply splayed and continuously shifting positions around and over one another's bodies. (But look carefully and don't miss that coffee cup that somehow gets carefully passed from hand to hand!) Sandstone (2008), a live duet, shows Kristen Hollinsworth and Joseph Poulson making similar spooning, embracing moves in the sandbox, until Hollinsworth squats and, with unceremonious determination, begins to dig at the sand like a cat who has just finished doing her business. The Body of Water (2008) video frames Luke Miller and Darrin Michael Wright, both stripped down to white underwear, in a narrow pool of what appears to be milk. As they embrace and softly grapple, their bodies rotate in and out of this liquid, shapes forming and dissolving in and out of visibility as music throbs and loops. Green, Green Grass (2008) uses that fake grass and bridge arch as a passage way for slithering bodies, over and over again. (I wonder how that material feels on the skin.) Forward (2008) finds Poulson dangling and deftly twirling from an aerial harness as his enclosure fills with fog.

In each piece, Marshall plays with the orientation of the dancing body to horizontal ground and the way we, as onlookers, discover and perceive the body in space (say, from the overhead perspective of a video camera or from the outside of a plastic, mist-filled enclosure). To the extent that we, as flesh-and-blood beings, identify with these bodies and their sensations, we might also feel penned in or slippery or upended. Each short piece has its charm. Place them all together, though, and their magical effects magnify.

Dance performance in Adamantine--which had its premiere at Montclair, New Jersey's Alexander Kasser Theater--isn't so much framed as engulfed by lighting tics, movable mechanical set elements and an aggressive score that veers from folksy (and weirdly disruptive) to percussive (insistently so). I found the piece maze-like, with music as its Minotaur, and filled with dead ends and sometimes attractive filler. I wondered, too often, if some of its theatrics were meant to be cheesy or just happened to be. Here's one example: the slowly, grandly revolving curtain that individual dancers play around, surf or smack and kick and that sweeps over their fallen dancers bodies as the drumming's rhythm suggests the Inexorable March of Time. And another: A wind machine picturesquely--and repeatedly--blowing a dancer's long hair and sending aloft her little jacket made of lightweight plastic wrap.

In any case, I revere the Company in Susan Marshall & Company, and in Adamantine, you can keep an eye on poetry-in-motion Poulson--a guy who can turn even the simple extension of one hand into a smart and deeply spiritual event--and the similarly vibrant Wright.

Performances by Kristen Hollinsworth, Luke Miller, Joseph Poulson, Ildiko Toth, Petra van Noort and Darrin Michael Wright. Live music by Peter Whitehead, who composed the score for both works, and Elton Bradman.


Lighting: Mark Stanley
Sound: Jane Shaw
Set: Jeremy Lydic (original design for Frame Dances by Roderick Murray)
Video: Ryan Holsopple; Jeremy Lydic for Adamantine

Costume: Mary Kokie McNaughter (Frame Dances) and Olivera Gajic (Adamantine)

Click here for program and ticket information.

Baryshnikov Arts Center
450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Giving themselves away at every moment...

A luminous summer evening. Dancers slip through breezecloudsmusic at the river's edge. I still get a powerful little thrill as I look through my photographs.

We Give Ourselves Away at Every Moment: An EVENT for Merce

July 26, 2010--First anniversary of the death of Merce Cunningham

"...we come together to nod in his direction through the ritual of dance itself."

Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City esplanade

a program of the River to River Festival, co-presented by Arts World Financial Center and the Battery Park City Authority

featuring choreography by Jon Kinzel, Lucinda Childs, Susan Marshall, Faye Driscoll and Bill T. Jones. Live music by David Eggar, Geoff Hersh and Kotchy.

curated and produced by Annie-B Parson and Will Knapp

Five plan major tribute to Merce

Five Choreographers to Honor Cunningham at River to River Festival

by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, July 1, 2010