SUSAN MARSHALL & COMPANY.

SUSAN MARSHALL & COMPANY BAM MAJESTIC THEATER DECEMBER 16-20, 1998

The beauty of Susan Marshall's evening-length The Most Dangerous Room in the House results partly from the dance's resistance to being understood. I don't really want to understand it--I just want to see it. Here's why: The dance is composed from a finely transient palette of human gestures summoning up vanishing states of mind and elapsed moments, as if offering a pointillistic reminiscence with an ever-shifting subject. One dancer recurrently lifts his hand in a "stop" signal that doubles charismatically as a greeting; another dancer's long arm curls back behind her, feeling the way blindly with a troubling tenderness. Couples wrestle like luminous, slippery opponents. So goes Marshall's well-edited graphic anthology, universal because it's insistently specific. The work, a New York premiere, was a part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.

Room tells no single story, though bits of narrative about a family surge and subside rhythmically from start to finish. There aren't full characters, only traces glimmering in a temporal flux. Emotions glimmer along: terror, dismay, contentment, erotic violence. The stark sheen of the eight dancers' everyday movements, repeated in signature sequences by each dancer, can seem dramatically urgent, underscored by David Lang's viscerally elegiac minimalist music (performed with impressive chutzpah by the Bang On A Can All-Stars). All told, the dance resembles the play of shapes in an asymmetrical human kaleidoscope.

Yet there's more to Marshall's kaleidoscope than most. Using two portable gray square "walls" to suggest the feeling of confinement and adversity--and sometimes, the comfort of enclosure--she evokes a generational array of relationships and conflicts in a series of ensemble dances, powerful duets, and solos. The sporadic reciting of a text written by Christopher Renino ushers new facets into the choreographer's domestic impressionism. Members of her tribe sometimes seem to defend themselves against unexplained awfulness. At other times, they surrender themselves to it. Lovers woo or bully one another; the piece includes astonishingly subtle and eloquent partnering. Throughout Room, images of spinning, sitting, and climbing (the walls, literally), and of percussively rapid entrances and exits, help unify the dance despite its inclination to skirt unity.

A "story" like Marshall's that distrusts a finale tends anyway to build enormous and enigmatic suspense. In the end, there is no true end to any of this--an odd satisfaction in itself.