Susan Marshall (choreographer)

Susan Marshall (born October 17, 1958) is an American choreographer and dancer. She is the Artistic Director and Choreographer of Susan Marshall & Company which she formed sometime between 1982 and 1983, working initially with dancers Arthur Armijo, David Dorfman, Jackie Goodrich, and David Landis. Marshall has created over thirty dance works throughout her many years working with the company. She is known for incorporating everyday abstract movements, repetition, and variety into her pieces. She encourages her performers to develop a level of intimacy between each other, and between their audiences. She wants the audience to feel an emotional connection to the dancers. 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.

Starting at Emanu-El Midtown YM-YWHA and PS 122, Susan Marshall & Company moved to Dance Theater Workshop in New York City for two- and three-week seasons in 1986 and 1987 respectively, during the second one of which her dance Kiss was performed, 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."

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.

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."

...
Wikipedia