Susan Marshall (choreographer)
Susan Marshall (born October 17, 1958) is an American choreographer. Marshall choreographs metaphoric worlds that often dwell at the intersection of several disciplines. Her work employs details of touch, initiation and gaze to explore the complexities of behavioral systems and of interpersonal relationships and patterns. The resulting dances are often densely woven, recursive, human in scale and speak to the negotiations of intimacy and questions of control, power, dependency and intention.[1]
Career
Susan Marshall & Company
Marshall is the Artistic Director of Susan Marshall & Company which she formed in 1985, working initially with dancers Arthur Armijo, Kathy Casey, David Dorfman, Jackie Goodrich, Eileen Thomas, among others. Early venues included Emanu-El Midtown YM-YWHA and PS 122. The company then performed at Dance Theater Workshop in New York City for three seasons, from in 1985 to 1987 respectively. There, in 1987, the company performed Kiss, which remains in repertory with other groups. Kiss is a duet in which a couple is suspended from above the stage via ropes or cables and harnesses. In a dance review for the New York Times (July 19, 1993) Anna Kisselgoff describes the performance as "a duet for a couple whose harness-equipped choreography sends them into space with centrifugal force and finally into a locked aerial embrace."[2]
The company began touring in 1987, and the next year Brooklyn Academy of Music commissioned Interior with Seven Figures for its Next Wave Festival. This would be Marshall's first evening-length work. An association with composer Philip Glass began in 1994 when Marshall used his music for a dance Fields of View, and in 1996 she collaborated with him on his dance-opera Les Enfants Terribles. Fields of View used closeups of photos by Weegee, who took tabloid photographs of New York City crime scenes between the 1940s and 1950s. This was one of the first times Marshall used artistic media in her choreography.[3]
Susan Marshall & Company has performed at the Edinburgh International Festival, the Spoleto Festival, Vienna Tanz, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition to her work with her company, Marshall has also created dances for the Lyon Opera Ballet, the Frankfurt Ballet, the Boston Ballet, and Montreal Danse. One of her most popular pieces is entitled "Cloudless" and was described by Hilary Ostlere in "The Financial Times (London, England)" as "... a mysterious piece that has little to do with its title for there are cloud in it, mostly in the form of Deborah Farre's framed projections. The series of 18 swiftly succeeding episodes - each thematically different yet linked choreographically - has been worked out in collaboration with the dancers themselves, who also move the props around. Each piece - Marshall calls them poems - is as different as its music, which ranges from Georges Bizet to Philip Glass." [4]
Princeton University
Marshall currently holds the role of the director of the Program in Dance at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts, which she assumed in 2009.[5]
Awards and Honors
In 1988 Marshall was an inaugural recipient of the American Choreographer Awards, given by the National Corporate Fund for Dance, and she also won a Brandeis University Creative Arts Award.[3]
In 2000, Marshall was the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Award.[6]
References
- ^ http://arts.princeton.edu/people/profiles/sm9/
- ^ Kisselgoff, Anna. "Review/ Dance; Susan Marshall Puts Entr'actes Into the Act." New York Times 19 July 1993: EBSCOhost. Web. 28 Sept. 2011.
- ^ a b Marshall, Susan. Current Biography. 1999. Biography Reference Bank. Web. 17 Oct. 2011.
- ^ Ostlere,Hilary. "Susan Marshall & Company THE CRITICS." Financial Times (London, England) 13 Mar. 2006, Europe ed. 1, Arts sec.: 8. Print.
- ^ Jowitt, Deborah. "Susan Marshall Gets Intimate; the veteran choregrapher brings Frame Dances and Adamantine to the Baryshnikov Arts Center." The Village Voice (New York) 8 June 2011, Print.
- ^ The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. "MacArthur Fellows July 2000". Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2007-06-02.
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