Music And Dance Reviews : Marshall’s Structures Evoke the Spiritual in Current Life

Using everyday movement to get inside feelings and relationships, Susan Marshall creates intricately crafted dance structures that evoke the spiritual dimension of contemporary life.

At the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Thursday, her fine, eight-member company provided another look at “Contenders” (previously seen on PBS in 1991 and at UCLA a year later) along with the more recent “Fields of View.” In both these half-hour pieces, individuals interacted within a larger community, comforted one another in times of loss and kept returning to the same points-of-action as if recalling some defining moment in their pasts.

Against Tom Kamm’s tent-like net drops, “Contenders” satirized the glamour and narcissism of professional athletes--in one comic sequence even presenting sex as a competitive, Olympic-style event. But as, repeatedly, a runner fell and others came to her aid, Marshall focused on the camaraderie of sports, plus the sense of pushing beyond one’s limits to new plateaus of achievement. Ultimately, as Pauline Oliveros’ score grew meditative and the dancers became focused on a dark horizon, “Contenders” invited the deepest possible metaphorical interpretation.

In “Fields of View,” Marshall attempted a lyric depiction of a state of consciousness in which reality merges with memory and fantasy, in which individuals stand outside time to glimpse the arc of their lives and then return to moment-by-moment experience. In other words, Antony Tudor territory, approached from a cooler, Postmodern perspective.

Set to Phillip Glass’ Fourth String Quartet, it achieved a sublime liquidity early on: whirlwind surges of dancing that appeared no less an inspired abstraction of nature than the onstage snowfall designed by sculptor Judith Shea that blew through the air and then drifted across the floor as the piece developed.

Unfortunately, Marshall’s vocabulary soon seemed too thin and prosaic for the richness of her theme and, as her piece doubled back on itself over and over, you had plenty of time to merge the experience of her choreography with the memory of Tudor and others who had expressed a similar Proustian vision with more extensive and satisfying lyrical resources.