Beginning with her first dances, more than thirty years ago, Susan Marshall has explored our attempts to find one another, to develop understanding, to navigate relationships. Her newest work, “Play/Pause,” with a score by David Lang, which she and her company presented recently at BAM Fisher, took this pursuit a step further, capturing the isolation that can result from our longing to be noticed and to control our stories in a hyperconnected world.
The theatre had been set up in a traditional fashion, with a bank of seats on one side. The space was empty, except for a large, whitish wooden wall about eight feet square, tilted back slightly and angled toward the audience, which occupied the downstage-right corner. Up in the balcony on one side, two guitarists and a percussionist sat with their instruments and equipment. Soon, Ching-I Chang entered, carrying a microphone attached to a cord. She looked at us frankly, taking us in, and then up at the musicians—Taylor Levine, James Moore, and Michael McCurdy. It was a brief, subtle sign that “Play/Pause” would be a transparent dance, with no pretense that it existed in a world other than ours.
Luke Miller and Pete Simpson came on and joined Chang at the wall, and embarked on a strange game. (Marshall is a master at vignettes of unclassifiable tasks.) Miller took strips of black tape and created a runic pattern on the wall, an equal sign over a vertical line over another equal sign. Chang, seeing this as an invitation, or as a challenge, placed the head of the microphone above the pattern, producing a loud thud, and scraped it down over the wood and the tape. She repeated this methodically, until Miller and Simpson managed to remove some of the strips and interrupt the compulsive activity. Chang, unfazed, simply began moving the microphone from Simpson’s chest to Miller’s, the impacts sounding like a booming faucet drip.
Gradually, the repetition caused the oddness to recede, and the progression of the small movements, their minute variations, and the deadpan way the dancers were performing them became absorbing, so much so that one might have missed Christopher Adams walking onstage and sitting down, then putting on a dark, glittery sock. Adams, a quiet, serious presence, then danced a wonderful, simple solo, his limbs lightly slashing through space, a counterpoint to the claustrophobia of the trio at the wall. (The sock recalled Michael Jackson’s glove, and hinted at a desire to approximate superstardom, if only briefly.) The others moved the wall upstage, and Simpson counted off for the musicians—“One, two, three, four!” Sound suddenly filled the space, the electric guitars and drums coming together in a satisfying rhythm. Darrin M. Wright and Kristin Clotfelter entered, and the whole cast launched into a relaxed, lush phrase in which an arm was flung casually down in front of the body, an ambiguous gesture that read as nonchalant in one moment and despairing the next.
The dance followed this non-narrative structure, switching from intense duets, crucibles of inchoate feeling, to swaths of full-bodied movement, characterized not by joy—the dancers remained impassive—but by relief, perhaps, at the chance to let down their guard. Duets are fraught undertakings in Marshall’s work; they can be full of near-misses, misconstrued overtures, struggles for control, pleas for comfort. Scenarios play out in finely wrought choreography in which plain gestures speak for themselves, and more complicated enlargements on those gestures are rendered perfectly comprehensible by what’s come before. Some of her stand-alone duets resolve in a singleness of purpose, but those in “Play/Pause” were of the futile kind.
Marshall and her collaborators had placed the dancers in a relatable world. Diana Broussard’s costumes, in blacks and grays and whites, were casual yet chic, and changed in the course of the dance, never jarringly. The set designer, Andreea Mincic, incorporated humble elements—the tape, the wall, a floor lamp—and augmented them with technology that both enhanced our perception of the people onstage and at the same time mitigated it. The wall had a grid of lights on its back, and as the dancers moved it around it divided the stage, compartmentalizing the dancers’ activities and closing off contact. The microphone amplified the smallest scratches and the loudest yells, but its cord attached it to an earlier era, and the very fact of amplification kept the raw human voice at a remove. Slender fluorescent tubes, sculptural light sources, had utilitarian bases that offset their elegance. The most curious parts of the set were small rectangular panels of Plexiglas, about a foot high, appended to the tops of what looked like old-fashioned microphone stands; these panels, which lit up, framed the dancers’ faces, drawing our scrutiny, but they also presented a barrier.
The idea of “Play” and “Pause,” of stopping and starting, recurred throughout the dance. A few times, the performers called in the music, as Simpson had done early on. Miller stepped up to a mike and said, crisply, “And!,” kicking the musicians into high gear. Clotfelter echoed him as the performers erupted in movement around the stage, and called “And … stop!” to draw the section to a close and usher in an enigmatic passage, in which Simpson stood close behind a glass panel, his breath fogging it. With a small cloth, Clotfelter wiped the vapor away—erasing, in effect, traces of Simpson’s voice, if not his life. When Clotfelter bent the articulated stand and the glass panel arced toward the ground, Simpson bent his body with it, poignantly, doing whatever was necessary to keep his face in the frame, to remain visible.
Simpson, in addition to dancing, was a kind of m.c. in “Play/Pause,” occasionally intoning bits of text. (“What the hell am I doing here?” he said near the beginning of the dance, lying on the floor.) He was an engaging interlocutor. In the middle of the piece, he was alone downstage, looking at us, breathing deeply into a mike. As he inhaled, one hand travelled along his neck and down onto his torso, indicating the path of the intake, then reversed course as he exhaled. The theatricality increased with each breath. After one inhalation, he handed the mike to an audience member, who duly exhaled into it. Soon, he held up the mike to the whole crowd, and we responded with a whoosh. Giggles rippled through the audience. Marshall used humor sparingly, judiciously; in this dark dance, in which discrete dramas kept enveloping us, the moments of lightness—they passed quickly—provided a respite, and in doing so wrapped us even more tightly.
Lang’s instrumental score alternated between a big, bright sound—euphoric, encompassing—and airier passages. His sensuous phrases complemented not only the desolation that Marshall kept placing before us but also the understated sexuality that cropped up in the dancers’ presentational attitudes. (This was especially vivid in a long central duet for Clotfelter and Chang, who cycled through progressively more brazen poses in clipped timing, as though caught in a photographer’s flash, trying on new personae.) Marshall also wove in two vocal tracks by other artists—the slow, shimmering “I Don’t Want Love,” by the Antlers, and “Champagne Year,” a resigned lament by the singer-songwriter St. Vincent. It was a canny decision: the added songs redirected the attention and jolted the brain into listening to words, forcing us to understand in another way.
Early in the dance, Simpson had said, “That’s not a perfect plan.” The line was unmoored from reference until it turned up in the St. Vincent song. As “Play/Pause” unspooled, the statement took on meaning: we do the best we can in trying to find somewhere to land, someone to be with. Marshall is a levelheaded choreographer, and has no illusions about our often ill-fated desire to connect. Still, this dance was dark but not bleak; fragments of hope lifted it. At the end, the six extraordinary performers lined up far downstage behind glass panels, which provided the only light in the now dark theatre. They were closer to us than they’d been before, their faces open, honest. In this final pause, they waited for some kind of affirmation. As they breathed, six unique patterns of vapor bloomed. This was their essence. And then it was gone.
Photograph by Stephanie Berger.
