Blue skies

UPS AND DOWNS Members of Susan Marshall & Company hang out onstage.

PHOTO: MARKO GEORGIEV

This week, MacArthur “genius” choreographer Susan Marshall pays a visit to Chicago. On Thursday 7 Susan Marshall & Company open a three-night run at the Dance Center, kicking off Columbia College’s performance series featuring pioneering women choreographers.

Marshall has run her award-winning, Manhattan-based Company since 1982. Her latest masterpiece, Cloudless, not only celebrates the company’s 20th anniversary, but in 2006 it also won the troupe a third Bessie Award—one of the much sought-after New York Dance and Performance Awards named in honor of Bessie Schonberg that annually recognize exceptional choreography, performance, visual design, music composition and other aspects of dance and performance.

Throughout her career, Marshall has been interested in the nuances of daily life. She incorporates these details into her work, making it accessible even to those without dance backgrounds. “I assume that when an audience comes to watch my work, they’re bringing the same facilities to read and understand movement that they have in everyday life, and they’re applying that to watching my dances,” says Marshall via phone from her Manhattan home. “In much the same way that people orient themselves when they walk into a crowded room, the audience will be looking at the faces of my dancers—wondering who’s looking where, who is clustered together, who is touching who—and they’re drawing information from that.”

In Cloudless, Marshall incorporates these familiar themes, but with one notable difference. Instead of working on a larger, evening-length scale as she first did at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1988 with Interior with Seven Figures—or on an operatic scale like her 1996 Les Enfants Terribles, a collaboration with composer Philip Glass—Marshall takes her approach back to the early and mid-1980s when she worked primarily in short form. Cloudless only lasts 75 minutes and is composed of 18 solos, duets and small group works, which are set to music ranging from pieces by Glass to a Bizet song recorded by David Byrne.

“My work first found its home in small theaters, which is natural for a young artist just starting out. And there was a certain intimacy to those sorts of evenings,” Marshall says. “Celebrating our 20th anniversary was a big landmark and with that came a sort of taking stock. Around that same time, there was some interest from other companies in a few of our early works—Kiss [now part of the Hubbard Street repertory] and Arms—and both of those works played a role in inspiring me to go back to some of my earliest concerns.”

For Marshall, that meant rediscovering a small-scale form. “I thought it was interesting to examine what is uniquely mine—and to discover if it is possible to find new challenges by going deeper in that direction,” she says. “All of that led me to reexamine aspects of Arms and Kiss. One obvious aspect of those works is that they’re short—seven minutes long. So there’s a brevity…and a density to them; they operate a lot more like poetry than a novel.”

Throughout Cloudless, everyday objects are utilized—chairs, a fan, a table—as well as others created specifically for the work, such as sculptor Deborah Farre’s cloud made of machine-knit fishing line. “In some ways, the evening works a little bit like a vaudeville performance. There are these brief works,” she says. “They’re very disparate—some are humorous, others are quite intense—yet by the end of the evening, there is some sense of threads that accumulate as the evening progresses and develops emotionally.”

As in Marshall’s other works, the title alone evokes a number of gorgeous images. “I like the implications of it,” she says, thoughtfully. “Are they beautiful or do they mean rainy days? And all of that has metaphoric potential.”

Cloudless floats at the Dance Center Thursday 7 through Saturday 9.