DANCE REVIEW : A Raw Power in Marshall’s Bleak Vision

Onstage at the UC Riverside campus theater, a man in white robes walks forward, making sweeping gestures of benediction. Suddenly, someone lifts him from behind and attacks him with a single, deadly stabbing/chopping motion. He falls. A woman nearby screams.

This action-pattern repeats, relentlessly, world without end, until one of the onlookers finally intervenes to stop it. But it cannot be stopped. Intervention only adds another victim to the cycle of violence. To Susan Marshall, martyrdom is inevitable: A saint will always be shadowed by an assassin. . . .

Three years after she became the major dance discovery at the Los Angeles Festival, Marshall has gone beyond defining one-on-one relationships through a distinctively rough-hewn movement style. Instead, she is testing her resources against daunting, large-scale issues--among them family values and religion. As before, she strips narrative down to pithy physical events but, this time, she develops brilliant complexities from the cross-currents of her characters’ desperate need.

In excerpts from her full-evening “Interior With Seven Figures” (1989, music by Luis Resto), Marshall depicts family life as an agonizing power struggle in which children are literally shaped up through blatant parental force and manipulation. In her new “Articles of Faith” (music by Linda Fisher), she looks at religious ritual as a binding principle in human society--though the only genuinely spiritual figures on view are either doomed (that martyr) or in an unholy rush to cast off all vestments.

Compared to the vision of intimacy in the duets “Arms” (1984) and “Kiss” (1987)--both also on the Tuesday UCR program--Marshall presents a bleak view of the late-20th Century in her new group pieces. Yes, we do see people cradling one another protectively, but more often they’re in a frenzy to brutalize their kids (“Interior With Seven Figures”) or to line up for a ceremonial group hug utterly empty of feeling (“Articles of Faith”). We share their dismay.

Not merely post-modern but post-psychological, Marshall wastes no time detailing individual motivations but shows her restless, troubled characters as compelled or conditioned to their behaviors. In the same way, the lovers in “Kiss” (music by Arvo Part) have no case histories to explain: They simply act out their drives directly with one another--and Marshall enhances the sense of risk in their relationship by placing the dancers in aerial harnesses.

The way that love can inspire trust and even transcendence is thus physicalized when Arthur Armijo and Kathy Casey briefly leave the floor to spin in each other’s arms, beyond the law of gravity. The stage technology here may be complicated but the emotion remains very pure and deep.

With its severely concentrated vocabulary (upper-limbs only), the familiar “Arms” gets at a similar idea in a more (literally) down-to-earth manner. We see Jackie Goodrich and Andrew Boynton each slowly learning to be together as a couple without diminishing their own (or partner’s) freedom of expression.

Will they take off into the ecstasy of “Kiss” or end up like the wretched oppressor-parents danced by Eileen Thomas and David Dorfman in “Interior With Seven Figures”?

Marshall’s latest works suggest there’s not much hope--for them or us. But the rugged power of her style and the exciting performances by her eight-member company give her uncompromising dance-parables exceptional authority. She is fast becoming one of the contemporary masters of modern dance.