Rooms to Move

To celebrate her company’s 25th anniversary, Susan Marshall
has created a double feature. Her two most recent works will be performed
back-to-back under one roof, but in different spaces—which means audiences will
experience the intriguing subtleties and thoughtful details of Frame Dances and
Adamantine on separate floors of the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

“They are real companion pieces because they’re completely
opposite,” Marshall says. “One is a stage work, and the other is all about the
intimacy of these smaller spaces, and your ability to be up close to the
dancers in a direct relationship. They have extremely different textures. But I
think, for that reason, they’re very complementary.”

For admirers of Marshall’s scrupulously shaped, quietly
resonant work, it has been quite a wait since her company has had a local
season—and this one is tantalizingly brief. (They took part in an outdoor Merce
Cunningham tribute event last summer, and Mikhail Baryshnikov performed a new
solo by Marshall last year.) Adamantine, a work for six dancers
commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair, premiered there in March 2009.
Surprising and unexpected lighting sources, oversized shadows and a large
rotating curtain help shape a resonant world in which danger and tenderness
coexist. In her admiring New York Times
review, Roslyn Sulcas praised “the beauty of Ms. Marshall’s rigorous
juxtapositions of the quotidian and the fantastical.” For sundry reasons,
Marshall has not presented it again until these performances in the Jerome
Robbins Theater.

“We had this wonderful relationship with Peak Perfs that
allowed us to put in rich creative time in the theater at an early stage of the
work, so we could incorporate the theatrical world of the stage into the
developing ideas—not as something that came after the fact—and the stage could
be part of our organic process,” Marshall says concerning the genesis of Adamantine.
“Often my process begins with the structural concerns or ambitions. The whole
design team, the dancers and I walked into the space to experiment. One of the
things we wanted to affect was the volume of the space—to somehow animate the
entire volume of the space. I also wanted to play with having the sound of the
theater—and the sounds that the dancers make—be audible and part of the sound
score.”

According to Marshall, as Adamantine developed, it
became a work about contrast. “In my past work, there have been moments in which
what is happening onstage is almost more of a kinetic sculpture—an object dance
that doesn’t involve any dancers. In Adamantine, there are places in the
dance where what’s moving are objects and structures.”

Marshall has appreciated the chance to spend two weeks in
residence at BAC. Audiences can choose from two different “seatings”: Beginning
with the more fluid, open experience of Frame Dances in the Howard
Gilman Space at 7 p.m. before moving into the Jerome Robbins Theater at 8 p.m.
for Adamantine; or they can begin their evening there and continue with
the 9:15 performance of Frame Dances. “It’s exciting to me that they
change venues as part of the same performance,” Marshall says, “and that they
will meet people going in as they’re coming out. I think that exchange will be
interesting.

Frame Dances, which was seen in an earlier version at
Music Theater Group’s Dumbo space three years ago and later in Montclair, is an
installation with dancing and live video. “We have to shape it to the specific
nature of the space. It’s like a gallery set-up, in that you can watch a dance
in a location happening live, and you can also watch it on video,” Marshall
says. “The Gilman will be one huge open space, and we’ll have three dancing
structures—or performance areas—that are also sculptured spaces.”

A section of her exceptional, Bessie Award-winning Cloudless
inspired the later work. “The idea behind Frame Dances is to embrace the
video frame as the new proscenium, and to have the body relate to that frame,
literally,” Marshall notes. “How you prioritize your viewing is up to each
audience member.”

The longtime company members who were so riveting in Cloudless—Kristin
Hollinsworth, Luke Miller, Petra van Noort, Joseph Poulson and Darrin Wright—continue
to work with Marshall, now joined by Ildikó Tóth. “They’re really
multi-faceted. It’s been an incredibly rich, fertile relationship,” Marshall
explains. “I think it gave us a really strong platform to be able to play—to
see possibilities and make discoveries. It’s like a very well-oiled machine: a
very small push takes you a long distance.”

Susan Marshall & Company

June 9–11, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St. (betw.
9th & 10th Aves.), 212-868-4444; $20.