Arms

Music

Luis Resto

Choreography

Susan Marshall

Lighting Design

Mark Stanley

Original Lighting Design

Mitchell Bogard

Premiere

1984
Performance Space 122 (New York, New York)

PNB Premiere

November 12, 2020
Pacific Northwest Ballet (digital release)

The 2020 PNB premiere of Susan Marshall’s Arms is supported by Sharon Lee.

In 1984, Arms helped signal Susan Marshall as a major artist and innovator in the history of contemporary dance when it premiered at PS 122 in New York City. The Village Voice called it “a small masterpiece.”

Arms, a five-minute duet performed most often by Marshall with company member Arthur Armijo, was a game-changer in the New York “downtown dance” scene and an important early example of Marshall’s innovations in expanding the formal structures of post-modernism to include everyday gestures and theater experiments. This was a departure from the cool-headedness of the Judson Dance Theater era of the 1960s and 70s, and the spectacle of the 1980s. What set Marshall’s work apart was her ability to calibrate repetitive minimalist structures to imbue everyday gestures with emotional resonance.

In 2006, Deborah Jowitt wrote in The Village Voice, “Watching Marshall’s choreography, from the 1984 duet Arms and her 1987 Interior with Seven Figures onward, I’ve been profoundly moved by the emotional resonance she coaxes from the simplest movements and patterns. She makes the lift of an arm speak in several languages at once, and you somehow grasp them all.”

“This duet became a signature work for our company. It was one of my earliest collaborations with two very important figures in my work, dancer Arthur Armijo and composer Luis Resto. Oddly enough, this one brief work charted the direction of the rest of my choreographic inquiries.” —Susan Marshall

Artist Biographies

Susan Marshall

Susan Marshal is artistic director of Susan Marshall & Company and since 1985 has created more than 40 dances for her company. She has also made works for Lyon Opera Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Marshall’s work with Philip Glass includes the stage direction of Book of Longing, a song cycle based on the poetry of Leonard Cohen, and the choreography, direction, and co-adaptation of Les Enfants Terribles, a dance opera based on the work of Jean Cocteau. Marshall has also choreographed and directed the music ensembles Eighth Blackbird and Bang on a Can’s Asphalt Orchestra.

A 2000 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Marshall has received numerous awards, including three New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies) for Outstanding Choreographic Achievement, a Dance Magazine Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was one of the first artists to receive an American Choreographer Award. In addition to her work for Susan Marshall & Company, Marshall has served as Director of Dance at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts since 2009.