“Susan Marshall’s seductive, disturbing world-premiere sextet, stripped bare as her stage, mines the essence of a tradition that defines Western culture in our time... Marshall uncovers the complex humanity of an experience sometimes dismissed as crowd-driven hysteria.”

—CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“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.”

—THE NEW YORKER

“The highlight of the evening was a duet dating from 1984 that opened the show’s second half: Susan Marshall’s “Arms.” Set to an electronic score, its lacing entanglements and power plays added up, paradoxically, to a love story.”

—THE SEATTLE TIMES

“Marshall gives our minds plenty of space in which to roam around...Her beguiling performers get ensnared in perplexing scenarios that are Pina Bauschian in their absurdity.”

—DANCE MAGAZINE

“In ‘Adamantine’ (Ms. Marshall’s fascinating new piece), the meaning is the slippery movement. It’s the beauty of Ms. Marshall’s rigorous juxtapositions of the quotidian and the fantastical.”

—THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Marshall is a fresh, original, powerful voice. This performance was the finest event of the Boston dance season.”

—THE BOSTON GLOBE

“The 30-some works Marshall has made for her company include everyday movements—rendered strange and profound through imaginative abstraction, repetition, and variation. She says that when she embarked on a career in choreography, ‘it felt like any kind of dance steps would invalidate the logic of the world I had created. And I just couldn’t figure out how to do it.’Reader, she figured it out. Over time, technically demanding dancing blended with the quotidian gestures that continued to interest her. She doesn’t define virtuosity as that dazzle that reinforces the distinction between spectators and performers that she likes to blur. ‘I think it’s a much subtler thing,’ she says. ‘I’m wondering if an audience’s perception of virtuosity isn’t something to do with detail, specificity, and accuracy.’ One of Marshall’s ongoing concerns is developing a semblance of intimacy—both among the performers onstage and between them and the audience. Expert though her dancers are, they look like people we might want to know. One constant in Marshall’s career: she makes reality magical.”

—THE VILLAGE VOICE

“So it goes in nearly two dozen scenes, all of them strange, some laugh-out-loud funny and some downright hot but also fumbling and clumsy, which makes them all the more interesting. Marshall treads comfortably in the surreal. There’s a dreaminess here that feels oddly natural, as if the dancers are not entirely alert to their surroundings but are muddling through on some kind of off-kilter instinct.”

—THE WASHINGTON POST

“Just when you think you have choreographer Susan Marshall pegged, she does something totally out of line with what she’s done before. And that means she’s truly a creative artist.”

—THE OREGONIAN

“Such originality, made flesh through virtuosic dancing and physical theater, belongs to the one and only Susan Marshall.”

—MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE