©Peter Serling
Hometown: Gainesville, Florida and Hershey, Pennsylvania
Current city: New York, New York
Age: 57
Attended an arts high school? No. I studied with Marcia Dale Weary of the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet in the afternoons after high school - an hour away. I knew I was interested in modern dance, but, to my knowledge, this was the only good training in my area. I came to dance through my involvement with gymnastics.
College and degree: Juilliard (2 years)
Website: http://www.sumac.org/
How you pay the bills: Professor at Princeton University, Lewis Center for the Arts
All of the dance hats you wear: Choreographer, artistic director, dance program director, teacher
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Play/Pause (Performer Luke Miller) Photography © Max Lakner
I left Juilliard after two years because the strict focus on Graham, Limón and ballet techniques didn't reflect how and what I wanted to study. The dance division director at that time, Martha Hill, kindly allowed me to continue a choreographic relationship with a number of dancers still in the program. I worked with them at the Juilliard studios, and they performed works of mine at Juilliard and on shared programs in other spaces. The challenge to make work that grew out of my own interests and questions, rather than those of my earlier training, led me to see a ton of dance and to write about it. I studied in private studios, showed my work on shared programs with my friends, and performed in the works of other independent choreographers.
Eventually, I made two works that began to feel like my own. I created one at The Yard in 1982 - my first dance constructed with a spare, limited and largely pedestrian movement vocabulary. The other was a work for CoDanceCo, the New York repertory company that commissioned many of the choreographers of my generation, including Mark Morris, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Ohad Naharin, Doug Varone, and Eiko and Koma. The piece was a seated duet made up entirely of touch-based gestures removed from their original context and re-constituted in a repetition-based formal structure.
In 1984, I created a standing duet, "Arms," made almost entirely of arm movement, which premiered at P.S.122. It was a turning point that anticipated my 1985 one-week season at Dance Theater Workshop with a steady group of dancers that became Susan Marshall & Company.
In the following three years I had a two-week season at DTW, a three-week season at DTW, and then a season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; our company began touring through the Kitchen Touring Program; Rena Shagan Associates came on as our booking representative; I created a work for Ballet Frankfurt; I stopped keeping our company books and hired a company management service team; I got married to my husband.
Describe your life in your 30s to the present:
That first company morphed into a second group, and then a third, fourth and fifth. Always, a few longstanding company members bridged the transition to the new group and provided creative continuity for me, and mentoring for the new dancers. The artistic work was always fulfilling, but there were also the logistical demands — the constant fundraising and strategizing required to keep the company operating and dancers artistically challenged and paid. That pressure led to periodic burn-outs. With enough space, I always rebounded fairly quickly, but after my son was born life became complicated, and by the time he was three I was pretty exhausted and sleep deprived.
Just as I was questioning how and if I should continue with the company endeavor, I received a MacArthur Award. I viewed the award not only as support and affirmation but also as a great gift of expectation and challenge. It made a world of difference.
Arms (Performers Darrin Wright, Luke Miller) Photography © Soula Kalamaras
Who were your major influences?
The major influences/mentors in my work have been the dancers and designers with whom I have collaborated. All of them brought and bring a body of artistic knowledge and experience that informs my work. The dancers have also taught me the sometimes difficult but crucially important lessons about being a director, artistic director and collaborator – lessons for which I am indebted to them. As someone who struck out on my own very early, I was basically self-taught as a choreographer. My peers played the mentoring role for me and continue to perform that function today. I thrive on feedback and continually call on my artist friends to act as second readers for my work as they develop.
As a young choreographer in the 80s and early 90s, I had a strong attachment to many specific works rather than an affinity with certain artists. I went about with numerous dances looping in my mind and serving as continual references, subjects of private discussion, provocations and pleasure. Some that come immediately to mind: Trisha Brown, Set and Reset, Group Primary Accumulation; Pina Bausch, Café Muller; Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Elena's Aria; Lar Lubovitch, North Star; Jean Claude Gallotta/Raul Ruiz, Mammame; DV8, Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men; Lucinda Childs, Available Light; Bebe Miller, Guardian Angels; Twyla Tharp, Fait Accompli; David Dorfman, Sleep Story; Susan Salinger, Untitled; William Forysthe, Artifact; Merce Cunningham, Quartet; Wooster Group, L.S.D. (...JUST THE HIGH POINTS...); Karen Finley, Black Sheep.
Adamantine (Performers Darrin Wright, Luke Miller, Joseph Poulson) Photography © Rosalie O’Connor
I do Pilates and try to arrange my schedule at Princeton to take our Conditioning for Dancers classes.
What the phrase “teaching artist” means to you:
The phrase makes me recall my early touring years, when the idea that an artist should teach master classes when he/she tours was just beginning to become something that presenters could and should require. Back then, I thought, you don't want me teaching – I have no experience as a teacher. Of course, years later I am extremely grateful for having been pushed to develop as a teacher. The years of touring and master classes grew into workshops and intensives. My teaching has always centered on choreography and collaborative creation – SUMAC, my company's annual summer intensive in New York, centers on offering choreographers and dancers space and support to practice making dances collaboratively.
In 2009 I became the Director of the Dance Program at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. This work is one of the greatest pleasures of my long experience in dance.
Please tell us about your most current project. Are you performing?
I am creating Chromatic, a collaboration with visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra and percussionist/composer Jason Treuting. We are co-creators and co-directors of the work, and we also perform in it. The work centers around Joseph Albers’s book Interaction of Color. This foundational text of minimalist painting and color theory serves as a kind of script to structure our explorations of color as a subject and experience.
Perception is a key theme of the book, and we make visual, sound and movement experiments that provoke close examinations of one thing in proximity to another. Do these juxtapositions shift or heighten our perceptions?
What keeps you passionate about making dances after all this time?
I continue to make dances because when I stop, I begin to miss it. I am very at home in the studio with dancers – that might even be one of my definitions of home. I feel relieved of self-consciousness and my attention is fully engaged. It's also just a hell of a lot of fun.
Frame Dances: Green, Green, Grass (Performers Luke Miller, Darrin Wright, Liza Austria, Joseph Poulson, Petra van Noort)
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I am a big fan of Susan Marshall!!!
Posted by: Eddie Martinez | 11/07/2015 at 11:38 AM