DANCING AS FAST, AND AS TIGHTLY, AS SHE CAN

This article originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times on July 31, 2005.

Montclair, N.J.

SUSAN MARSHALL is putting the finishing touches on her new work, five brief dances sheltering under the umbrella title "Cloudless," to have its premiere this week at Jacob's Pillow. At least the rehearsal schedule called for finishing touches. It sometimes looks as if she is reinventing the dances from scratch, like a God with second thoughts.

We're at the Alexander Kasser Theater, an intimate state-of-the-art house on the Montclair State University campus. Its executive director, Jedediah Wheeler, one of the commissioners of Ms. Marshall's current work - the others are Jacob's Pillow and Dance Theater Workshop, the venerable showcase for ground-breaking dance in Manhattan - has offered the choreographer theater time. This means she can move her work in progress out of the studio and develop it, with full production values, in a performance space, something she could not afford to do on her own. Mr. Wheeler, it would seem, agrees with the MacArthur Foundation, which made Ms. Marshall a fellow in 2000, that the people we regard as geniuses should not starve to death.

She has also received a Guggenheim fellowship; testimonials from the likes of Philip Glass, with whom she has collaborated; and positive reviews galore. The Chicago Tribune, for example, called her work "as profound as the art of dance can get."

Still, she can't pay the rent. Her Web site, susanmarshallandcompany.org, says so up top and straight out. The plea for funds essential to her company's projected 20th-anniversary season at Dance Theater Workshop next spring tells prospective supporters exactly what their contribution will buy, while it reveals the high cost of making dances: $100 pays for a single day's use of a studio; $1,000 puts a half-dozen dancers into the studio for a day; $10,000 commissions a new (short) dance. Poetic richness coupled with economic poverty - this is the state of dance in America. Ms. Marshall seems to take the situation in her stride: "I look at it," she said in a tone that precludes further discussion, "as a challenge to be embraced."

The financial straits, which clearly dictate working "smaller, tighter, faster," as Ms. Marshall puts it, support her present artistic impulses. "At midcareer," she said, "I began wondering what ideas and structures were central to my work. Looking backward and pushing deeper seemed to be the best way to go forward."

She started with two early winners that are modest in means, stunning in effect. "Arms," from 1984, is a stationary duet in which the dancers stand side by side, faces impassive, as their upper limbs, flailing, reaching, striking and twining, speak for the whole body and the soul as well. The 1979 "Kiss," which will appear on the Pillow program, has its two performers suspended in rope harnesses as they swirl deliriously into each other's embrace, then pull back into a more isolated association, over and over again. Both pieces seem to predict and sum up Ms. Marshall's later work, in which pedestrian gestures, distilled to near abstraction, symbolize human desire and its inevitable partner, human conflict.

"Cloudless" is true to the small and tight stipulation Ms. Marshall has dictated to herself. The pieces for the Pillow are for one to five people; their duration is roughly 4½ to 6 minutes. For the Dance Theater Workshop engagement next March, where an expanded version of "Cloudless" will constitute the entire program, Ms. Marshall will double the number of pieces and let some run as long as 11 minutes. Throughout Ms. Marshall's career, both tiny, terse creations for a nearly bare stage and big works with lavish production values have conveyed the same message: We are always of two minds about what we want. Defining, then articulating, our own state of mind is tough enough, but understanding that of others is well-nigh impossible. Inevitably, Ms. Marshall's work tends to be dark.

Reluctantly, she agreed: "If you're working with complexity and you're working with the body, some of those overtones and undertones are going to be dark. I like to think, though, that they're always counterbalanced by upward movement - and tenderness."

Untrammeled joy, a rare quality in Ms. Marshall's spectrum, actually prevails in the "Cloudless" solo for Petra van Noort. In perpetual motion, eyes gazing skyward, hands whirling and fluttering like a flock of butterflies, the dancer embodies a child's ecstasy in merely being alive. When, toward the end, the dance slows down, it suggests that the ardent child has matured into a woman who keeps her early intimations of delight unextinguished inside.

Today's rehearsal, with Ms. Marshall still adjusting the Pillow pieces - sometimes substantially - and grappling with early drafts of the Dance Theater Workshop material as well, offers a panoramic view of the choreographer's idiosyncratic working method. Unlike Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp, Ms. Marshall does not follow the conventional route of choosing musical accompaniment at the outset, then inventing movement with her own body and transferring it to the dancers largely by physical demonstration. The sound score for "Cloudless" is being created in tandem with the choreography by Jane Shaw, and Ms. Marshall draws the movement out of her dancers, beginning with long sessions in directed improvisation. Throughout the process, she operates almost entirely via words.

"All the actual movement in my work is generated by the dancers," Ms. Marshall explained. "I start by setting them in motion with instructions about space, timing and the nature of the activity. I give them physical goals - the more abstract, the better. The dramatic or psychological subtexts evolve as the dance develops, through our group discussions about where the work wants to go. I like to create through the back door, you see, because that's where the discoveries - and the surprises - are."

If Ms. Marshall's style of choreographing is meditative and communal, her method of accomplishing a day's work in the theater is a marvel of efficiency. Ms. Marshall runs the dances that are almost performance-ready, still allowing for "enormous changes at the last minute," all the while engaging her performers in the process. Primary work on new pieces is deftly sandwiched into the schedule. The fairly raw material is allowed to be fitful and awkward.

Whenever there's a moment's break in the activity, Ms. Marshall addresses the sound, light and props, along with mini-conferences about where a dance is going and what it means. Not once does she project the frantic urgency that her packed agenda and impending deadlines might well provoke. Ms. Marshall seems particularly concerned about the transitions from one dance to the next. "Because it's in the moments between events that some of the most meaningful and magical things happen," she said. "You've put your energy into making what you think are the meaty, central parts of your dance. As is only natural, things haven't turned out as you expected. Each part has taken on a life of its own. And now you have to connect them."

Copyright © 2005 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.