“Sawdust Palace”
Susan Marshall & Company
Kogod Theatre, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland
April 12, 2008
by George Jackson
copyright 2008 by George Jackson
With its circus title and cabaret staging Susan Marshall’s latest opus was on the light side and a little giddy. It dovetailed neatly with springtime frolics on the college campus. Oh, there were moments when a serious breeze blew through its absurdist proceedings, acrobatic stunts and rangy dancing but these gusts subsided amidst bushels of surrealist fun. A pity that, because “Sawdust Palace” could have been more than an entertainment. It started (rather like Jerome Robbins’s “The Concert”) with a put-upon pianist and passed through 20 scenes or circus “acts”. Some made you laugh, some made you squirm but a few of them almost made you think.
Boy dances with boy, girl tries to dance with boy pianist, boy dances alone, boy dances with girl, threesomes form and there are foursomes too. Besides blending club gyrations with loose ballet, what Marshall’s six performers (and co-choreographers) do is physical theater and mock burlesque. Strangeness rather than dance dynamism, gymnastic bravura or even sensuousness seems to be the purpose of much of the action. One of the oddest acts is a semi-striptease by two guys who turn provocation into a music session for the flesh – their bared skin becomes drum and vibraphone.
In a few early scenes of this 90 minute work Marshall hints at questions about self expression, human interaction, distraction, obsession, placation and valuation. Just as these are about to ignite, she douses them. She also lets dance ideas stay unsprouted. One particularly promising piece of choreographic material that Marshall ends up throwing away as mere trickery is pressing two bodies together tightly and passing through this organic cohesion a third body as if it were a hypodermic needle.
The music for Marshall’s romp, edited by Jane Shaw, has an offbeat style despite such diverse sources as the sentimentality of Edward Elgar, the sexiness of Magnetic Fields’s “69 Love Songs”, the brio of Mikis Theodorakis’s “Zorba” and the allusions of Peter Whitehead’s takes on the “Giselle” score. A standout among the six performers was Luke Miller. He is tall, has a sensualist’s lips under innocently large eyes, moves smoothly and mimes subtlely. The two - just two - lithe, comely and versatile women were Kristen Hollinsworth and Petra van Noort; the pair of acrobatic men were Joseph Poulson and Darrin M. Wright. Alexander Rovang is a pianist pantomimist in the tradition of Maurice Bejart’s and John Neumeier’s Elizabeth Cooper, Jerome Bel’s Florian Mueller and Jerry Zimmerman – in the first cast of the Robbins “Concert”.
[Bard College and the University of Maryland commissioned Susan Marshall’s “Sawdust Palace”.]
