Spectators at an Event. - BAM Majestic Theater - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, March, 1995 by Anne Tobias

Attending a performance is a lot like spying, with the audience a mob of licensed voyeurs. The dancers are often fictively blind to our presence, and we train an avid gaze on their every move. Susan Marshall's Spectators at an Event emphasizes this point and turns it on its head. In the initial moments of the piece a rolling onstage spotlight insistently captures a pair of dancers in its searing, inquisitive beam. When one of them collapses, the bright probe ruthlessly exposes personal calamity as a matter of public interest. Later, a group gathers, people eagerly vying for a better view of some unspecified attraction. Bathed by GOrecki's mournful, foreboding Second String Quartet (played live by the Cassatt String Quartet), similar events unfold with a dark and dangerous edge, little mitigated by Marshall's sporadic use of folk-dance material: linked stomping lines, circles upon circles of life-affirming humanity.

Reinforcing the choreographic images of ogling, prying, and peeping are projected photographs by Weegee (Arthur Fellig), whose camera's eye focused on attentive crowds. The photographer watched bystanders as they reacted--horrified, dismayed, amused --to something they saw. And suddenly, during the dance, it seems as if we, the audience members, are what they are seeing, their eyes staring--with horror, dismay, amusement--straight out at us. This is the crack in the proscenium's invisible fourth wall, and the dancers, their ranks bolstered by untrained pedestrians, break all the way through. As bright houselights flick on, they invade the private sphere of the audience, running down the aisles, whispering to us, even videotaping us ana replacing, up on the big screen, the faces of Weegee's subjects with our own spied-upon countenances.

Intent on rattling our convictions about watching the dance, Marshall employed dramatic devices that verged on being overplayed and almost too distracting. As a result, I was more intellectually than viscerally stimulated. Yet Marshall's inquiry remains intriguing. Who's watching whom? And what do we keep looking for? In life, as in dance, we find ourselves constantly in search of the exquisite moment, be it one of disaster or delight.

And, as if to demonstrate the exquisite moment, the choreographer rounded out her program with Fields of View, an unequivocal delight. The movement idiom is, as always with Marshall, plainspoken, an utterly human means of getting from here to there. Yet in this dance it takes a turn toward fantastic, melancholic grace and unfathomable mystery.

Snow falls, a veil across the stage-left wings. The dancers, their iridescent sheaths shimmering like a soap bubble, emerge from the storm and disappear once again. They coalesce into lovely patterns that leave one odd, lonely figure, and then the patterns disintegrate. Two women swoop a man up and over their heads, prone, and then lay him to rest on the whitened ground. Nothing is permanent, not beauty, not life. With Fields of View, Marshall acknowledges this truth, and makes us wish, with longing for all things lost, that it were not so.