Susan Marshall is a renowned New York City-based choreographer who’s bringing her new dance show “Play/Pause” to UCLA at Royce Hall on Saturday. “Play/Pause” fuses Marshall’s trademark choreographic style with visual language taken from pop culture and popular dance. The show also features six dancers performing to a rock-dominated score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang.
Daily Bruin’s Kevin Truong talked to Marshall about the inspiration behind the show’s concept, her creative process and advice to students who want to pursue choreography.
Daily Bruin: Where did the idea behind “Play/Pause” originate?
Susan Marshall: In the collaboration with David Lang and the dancers and designers on this work, I began by posing choreographic questions and the work emerges out of the responses to those questions. One starting point, for example, was the fact that I both love and cringe from the “Damn it, just dance” drive. I’m not guaranteeing you’ll actually see that in the work, but that did inform our investigation.
DB: What do you mean by “cringe” and why did you decide to put popular culture influence in this work?
SM: There’s nothing about the popular vocabulary that makes me cringe, I love it. It’s just that in my world you don’t see people emoting and dancing to the music for the personal emotional catharsis. I think the material I’ve been drawn to a lot in my work has to do with pedestrian movement vocabulary which usually centers on the familiar use of touch or gaze or gestures. One of the things that I’ve been feeling is that in the media age that we now live in, one has to include the popular social dance and the moves of pop music icons as part of this pedestrian familiar language, it’s ubiquitous.
DB: Are you saying the new way that we consume media proliferates this pop culture more in our lives than it used to?
SM: Yeah, I mean who doesn’t know the hand gesture from “Single Ladies”? You know there’s so many dance moves and ways of dancing that are just vernacular – they’re omnipresent and very natural to us. In the dance world, if we talk about pedestrian vocabulary, we mean it comes from vernacular daily life, but I think we can include this whole movement world in there as well.
DB: How did the type of music inform how you choreographed the show?
SM: David Lang gave us a number of selections of music that we could use in almost a modular fashion – we could just work with this in the rehearsal process and with the musicians to see how it evolved. So sometimes he would give us a lovely, elegant, minimal, delicate setting and we would discover we could use it (delicately and elegantly) but we might also use it in a rocked-out way.
DB: How does this work differ from your earlier work?
SM: No matter how distant from myself my starting point is, or how foreign the movement vocabulary or process is that I employ, I find that all roads return to my own logic and way of seeing. That being said, though, I think the movement and feel of the piece is more driven by the music, but with a live ensemble with electric guitar and drums, how could it not be? I would say though audiences who know my work would certainly still absolutely recognize it as mine.
DB: Do you have any advice for students trying to break into choreography?
SM: Well I think if you want to choreograph, you have to do it a lot. You don’t learn to become a choreographer by being a dancer in someone else’s work. The other thing I like to remind myself and to remind other choreographers is that they’re not the only choreographic mind in the room, that most dancers enjoy contributing creatively in the process. I also feel strongly when you can create a sense of play, then that’s what makes everyone feel free to contribute and that’s what keeps me doing it.