Of Infants and ‘Enfants’

Choreographer Susan Marshall’s mid-’80s dance “Kin” included an odd motion: a dancer curled her hand into an awkward knot to knock into her partner’s forehead. The movement is repeated by Paul and Lise, the adolescent siblings of “Les Enfants Terribles,” a dance-opera Marshall created with composer Philip Glass last year.

As Marshall sits in her living room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on a sunny September morning, cradling 3-month-old son Nicholas--who has a head full of straw-colored hair and a startlingly wide grin--she considers how the movement has entered her life again.

“Now that I know a little about child development, I know that a hand like that isn’t fully mature,” she says, kissing Nick’s curled right fist. “Like Paul and Lise aren’t fully mature either.”

Marshall delights in these overlappings of her life and her art.

“I like it when there’s something emotional and personal about the work,” she says. “When there’s some personal resonance in the subject.”

Such resonances have always been a hallmark of her dances, from the process through the finished product. At a recent rehearsal for “Les Enfants” in preparation for an 11-week, 21-city U.S. tour that will bring it to the Wiltern Theatre on Friday and Saturday, the lanky Marshall shows a meticulous eye that is both professionally impressive and faintly maternal.

Marshall, dressed in jeans and sandals, hair in a ponytail, stands by the lighting table in the middle of the darkened theater at the Performing Arts Center in Purchase, N.Y., just north of Manhattan. She watches her dancers crisscross the stage in seeming chaos, noting a skewed position here, an entry cue there, then turns to talk to the tour manager, Robin Davis. How will everyone be reimbursed for the train tickets that brought them here? she wants to know, and she then steps down to the stage to correct the exact angle of a bent wrist. As she works on a problematic moment in which dancer Mark DeChiazza disappears from the light, she asks, “Mark, are you warmed up enough to do that? Maybe you should just do the preparation. I don’t know if you should be doing that if you’re not warm.”

Rushing off to spend an hour with her husband and Nick before curtain time, she pauses backstage to confer with sound engineer Dan Dryden on the precise timbre and volume of a slamming door.

“It needs to be just a little bit louder and more emphatic,” she explains. “And we need to hear them laughing just a little bit more.”

It is in the nurturing of just such details that Marshall’s dances are made. She is both choreographer and director for the evening-length “Les Enfants,” which is based on the 1929 novel by Jean Cocteau and the film made from it. The story follows the destructive relationship between a brother and sister. With its intricate integration of music, dance and theatrical elements, it is the most complex project Marshall has ever done, but its deepest concerns are familiar Marshall territory: the exploration of human relationships through physical interaction and the mysterious ways that movement reveals the psyche.

“I’m one of those people for whom the dance has to be about something,” she says. “And it’s got to be about people in some way.”

Which is why she starts with the personal or, really, the interpersonal. Her raw material, she says, is “the way someone doesn’t look at you when they walk in the room--all those little things you observe in the body where you know exactly what they mean, and yet you don’t. It’s both mysterious and very clear.

“I think everyone takes it in when something unusual happens. It’s just that I take it in with a footnote.”

‘Les Enfants” begins a string of Susan Marshall performances in Los Angeles. On Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 at the Wiltern, the celebrated Lyon Opera Ballet will dance her 1994 work “Central Figure,” set to Glass’ String Quartet No. 5 and dedicated to one of Marshall’s former dancers, Arthur Armijo, who died of complications of AIDS. And a month later, Montreal Danse will perform her “Lines From Memory” (also to Glass), a 1995 piece about a disintegrating relationship, at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Theatre.

The Glass collaboration--Marshall jokingly says working with him is “playing with the big boys”--and the critical mass demonstrated by these performances may be a sign that Marshall, 38, is finally coming into her own. Although she is one of the most acclaimed and respected choreographers to come out of the 1980s, and has certainly received her share of prestigious grants and gigs, she has not achieved the sort of name recognition or success of her generational peers like Mark Morris or Bill T. Jones.

“Other people get a lot of the attention, but Susan could well be the best choreographer around right now of that whole crew,” says David White, director of New York’s Dance Theater Workshop, the pivotal modern dance launching pad, which presented Marshall in 1984 and ’85. White also produces the Downtown Dance and Performance Awards, or the Bessies, modern dance’s equivalent of the Tonys, one of which was just awarded to Marshall and Glass for “Les Enfants.” “There’s no doubt that she’s getting more visible, but she’s not a self-promoter or an eccentric character. Her work is that much quieter--it is what you see.”

And what we see is, for the most part, everyday kinds of movements shaped into dance language. In the 1984 duo “Arms,” Marshall created an intimate male-female portrait out of things like a casual arm over the shoulder that became a violent push, an embrace that turned into a clinging stranglehold. In “Contenders” (1990), she took sports movements--a diver’s preparation, a wrestler’s grip--and turned them into a parable of competition in life. In the 1988 “Interior With Seven Figures,” dancers struggle with one another in a disturbing portrayal of a dysfunctional family.

“I discovered that I could use natural gesture accompanied by more abstract movements and those two can inform each other,” Marshall says.

She is fascinated by the not-so-hidden meanings of body language. “If someone embraces you and pushes you away first, you know exactly what that means--or you feel you know. There’s a lot left unsaid, literally, and yet there’s so much you know.”

Which is what Marshall reveals. Says White: “People tell you secrets in her work.”

Marshall’s dance language is the stuff of drama and narrative, which until recently set her apart from other contemporary choreographers, who tended to focus on finding new ways of using the body and abstract compositional concerns. The scale and complexity of her work has expanded in the ‘90s, but her interests remain the same.

“Where she’s gone is very consistent with where she came from, which is creating a very succinct American dance theater,” White says. “There’s a sense of understanding who these characters are, even if it’s only in a visceral way. It’s really an intense emotional storytelling, which is what dance theater is about.”

It was Marshall’s skill with such emotional storytelling that prompted Glass to ask her to collaborate with him on “Les Enfants Terribles,” the last in a trio of operas (the others were “Orphee” and “La Belle et la Be^te”) he has done based on the works of French Surrealist Cocteau.

“There’s a lot of modern dance where people don’t look at each other or touch each other,” Glass says. “But this piece is really about relationships, and when I saw Susan’s work I just had the intuition that she was the right person.”

Glass and Marshall first agreed on the basic themes and story line and how it would unfold. It was Marshall’s idea to use multiple casting for each character. She combined three dancers with one singer each to portray Paul and Lise, siblings trapped in a private fantasy world and an obsessive relationship with each other. One dancer and singer pair plays Gerard, a friend sucked into their emotional swamp who is also the narrator, and another pair plays both Dargelos and his double Agathe, with whom Paul falls in love, precipitating the piece’s tragic end.

Marshall compares the technique of multiple casting to a courtroom drama “where you get two versions of the truth.” In “Les Enfants,” she says, it allows “the work to be more abstract, more complex, so it isn’t just the dancer and the singer, with you asking which one’s the real one.”

The singers’ lines (translated from French) and Gerard’s English narration are shown in supertitles, but the action onstage doesn’t always follow the text. Instead, the dancing becomes a whirling physical mirror of the characters’ turbulent interior worlds, what Marshall calls the emotional subtext. At one point, all four Pauls and Lises grapple with one another, acting out their internal and sibling conflicts.

Marshall let Cocteau himself be a guide to that emotional subtext. According to her, Cocteau wrote that “Les Enfants” could be understood by listening to the song “Make Believe” from “Show Boat,” with its references to pretending to be in love. It became her key for empathizing with the neurotic siblings. “I think everyone knows what it’s like to be in love with the idea of being in love.”

She also mined the fact that Cocteau wrote the story after recovering from opium addiction.

“Paul and Lise are obsessed with each other, but in a sense they’re more obsessed with the world they’ve created,” she says. “I think Cocteau is giving us a parable not only about the dangers of self-involved love but of the danger of living too much in a world of your own creation and not enough in the real world.”

Looking at Marshall’s own life, one wonders where she gets the ability to understand such convoluted and conflicted characters. She grew up in Hershey, Pa., where her parents--her father is chairman of the department of behavioral science at the Hershey Medical Center, part of Pennsylvania State University, and her mother co-founded the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Organization for Women--supported her interest in dance. She started with gymnastics, studied ballet for two years and was accepted at Juilliard Academy, but she dropped out of that celebrated school after two years, finding it restrictive and overly competitive.

“I was getting ready to go back for the third year and I literally got sick to my stomach, and I thought, ‘This can’t be the right choice,’ ” she says, smiling and shaking her head.

At the end of the ‘70s, she started the usual round of day jobs and studio classes in Manhattan, but she wasn’t aiming for a dancer’s career.

“If I wanted to be a choreographer ultimately,” she says, “why would I stop to dance for 10 years and then start again?”

At first, she says bluntly, her work was “extremely derivative.” Her creative breakthrough was in a duet she and Arthur Armijo created in 1982, the year she formed her company. Armijo worked with her for more than a decade, as did many of her early dancers, and the rest of her life has been remarkably consistent as well: She has lived in the same building (although in four different apartments) for 18 years and has been with her husband, Chris Renino, a high school English teacher and writer, for just as long.

She takes a practical approach to organizing her artistic and personal life. Glass remembers that when they were working on “Les Enfants,” Marshall and Renino were trying to plan their baby making so that Nick’s birth would fit easily into the rehearsal schedule.

Marshall’s manner is low-key and direct, frequently punctuated by a wry, quiet smile, and she matter-of-factly juggles conversation and baby from lap to swing to crib during an interview. She seems to have a singular lack of star or even artist ego. That may be at the root of her ability to stand back and analyze herself and others. When asked where in her stable life she finds the inspiration for the sometimes tortured relationships in her pieces, she smiles again.

“See, to me they’re not tortured, they’re true. They’re complex.” She talks about “Arms” as an example: “It’s not about violence, it’s this struggle for this place in the middle [of a relationship]. So, to me, it’s a very beautiful, hopeful work that ends in union.”

In addition to her own insights and experiences, Marshall draws heavily on her dancers’ lives in her melding of the personal and artistic. They become both collaborators and intimates, and although the current group is mostly new, she tends to work with the same people for years. Her voice softens when she talks about someone like Eileen Thomas, who has been with her since 1985, or about Armijo. The dancers’ pictures cover her refrigerator along with photos of her family.

“The relationship with her company is very important to her,” says Glass, who notes that she recently auditioned 200 dancers to find three new members. “It becomes a family thing.”

Rehearsals are “a very talky process,” with a lot of improvisation based on shared stories and observations.

“Except for the very newest members, I have a closeness and shared history with many of the dancers,” Marshall says. “They bring their own lives and personal histories to the work, and then it’s also about the life we share together, and then it’s about whatever we say it’s about. For me that deep overlap is very rewarding.”

It works that way for the dancers as well.

“There’s always part of my life in the dances,” says Thomas, sitting in the cafeteria at Purchase. “Even in this crazy opera, there are elements that I have lived. That’s the reward, that I get to inhabit a world like that out in public.”

Marshall consistently credits the contributions of her dancers in interviews and program notes, but the dancers emphasize that the finished product is Marshall’s.

“She’s very open to input and yet she is never pushed around by it,” says DeChiazza, who has danced with her for four years, leaning back in a dressing room at Purchase. “You know your opinion won’t always be accepted, but it will be listened to and even sought. [But] it always comes down to [the work] being assembled and crafted very meticulously by Susan.”

The overlap between Marshall’s personal and creative relationships with her dancers is most apparent in “Central Figure,” created for the Lyon Opera Ballet in the fall and winter of 1993 and ‘94, shortly after Armijo died. Critics have called it “a beautiful and eloquent dance” that comes to a “cathartic emotional resolution.”

In the piece, a central male figure appears and disappears, finally walking behind a scrim while the company waltzes in a kind of eternal dance.

“It became about the world you share when you dance with someone--and also about the joy of dancing,” Marshall says. “Because the other thing that was both upsetting and haunting to me was how life presses forward in spite of the loss of someone you love, the constant surge of life to get you back in the stream. So, for me, it’s about how Arthur is always onstage, how I carry with me the way Arthur has informed my work.”

For the last two years for Marshall, it’s been all “Les Enfants” and her own enfant, Nick. But she has begun a new work, one that she says will premiere next spring. And this time, it’s a return to her telling her own stories, rather than applying her techniques to another’s tale. At first, however, when she talks about it, it hardly seems like a Susan Marshall life-into-art piece. Just as her world seems most sunny and successful, she is making a dance about “fear and chaos.”

She points out, however, that the connection is there.

“Maybe it has something to do with becoming a mother,” she says, laughing. “You can’t control your world, you know, or that sense of the chaos that’s out there. There’s so much fear attached to being a mother. So I thought it might be good to take that on.”

She ties it back to yet another personal element in her work, the idea of using her dances not just to depict life but to affect it; to make her wishes come true. In the resolution of “Arms” “was a wish for me and Chris to find that place of unity.” In “Central Figure,” “there was something of a wish to keep Arthur with us a little longer.” And she has found something to desire even in the ominous subject matter of the new dance. “There is an order within the chaos, and that’s why the piece is optimistic. It’s about finding the beauty and sense and logic within the chaos,” she says. “So again, it’s a wish.”

It seems a surprisingly irrational way of looking at things for someone who blends her life and art making as methodically as Marshall does. But maybe she’s just taking care that the personal resonance she loves in her dances doesn’t get too far out of control.

“I have a little bit of a superstitious bent,” she says. “It’s amazing to me how things twist and turn and end up coming true.”

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* “Les Enfants Terribles,” Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. $13-$40. (213) 825-3101. Also: California Center for the Performing Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido, Oct. 27, 8 p.m. $28-$46. (760) 738-4120. “Central Figure,” Lyon Opera Ballet, Wiltern Theatre, Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, 8 p.m. $10-$45. (213) 825-3101. “Lines From Memory,” Montreal Danse, Luckman Theatre, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, Nov. 22, 8 p.m. $15-$32.50. (213) 343-6600.