SUSAN MARSHALL & COMPANY
Of the works on the Dance Center program by this New York-based choreographer, Arms (1984) seemed the clearest expression of Marshall’s technique: a throwaway surface that belies the dark subtext. She captures the way that movement, all by itself, can reveal the obscure intent. Despite its abstraction, this duet (danced by Jackie Goodrich and Andrew Boynton) evokes street kids in love. The intensity of their affection shades into violence–an amorous approach can look like aggression and be met as if it were, a caress is often not bestowed by but forced from another.
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The two dancers face the audience throughout, moving only very slowly toward us; their arms are the focus. Although isolating the arms may at first seem the simplest and most straightforward isolation possible, the first thing we notice is that these movements are not truly isolated. An arm thrown up, if the body’s allowed its latitude, naturally brings the rib cage with it . Indeed, one of Marshall’s preoccupations seems the body’s natural impetus, its natural rhythms–what gives even the nondancer’s movements grace and continuity and makes them flow to and through another person, inciting a response. In one of Arms’ motifs, for example, the woman pulls the man’s arm around her shoulders; but as soon as it starts to settle there, she shrugs it off. After several repetitions, her propulsive shrug causes a rebound: he drops from the waist like a rag doll. Her shrug–her rejection of him–then shades into a swoop forward to embrace and retrieve him, to bring him back upright. These motions, however suggestive emotionally, are always abstract; the piece ends with the dancers raking the air above their heads, their arms whirling in nearly intersecting patterns. (The music, by Luis Resto, often recalls the beating of helicopter blades.)
The third segment I found more curious, more adolescent, and ultimately somewhat less resonant than the first two. Two men (Arthur Armijo and Jeff Lepore) vie for the attention of a woman (Eileen Thomas). They take turns slow dancing to the music–Percy Sledge’s rendition of “When a Man Loves a Woman”–and there’s a lot of teasing and taunting as partners are switched: who will ultimately be left out? There’s a lot of the cruelty of adolescents, who will shove their successful amorous adventures in the faces of those less fortunate, and a lot of adolescent self-absorption (a mirror has been added to the set). Of course whoever’s excluded can always look in the mirror, can always dance with himself or herself–indeed, may have been doing so all along.
