A new performance-installation project led by MacArthur “Genius Grant” award-winning choreographer, professor and Director of the Program in Dance Susan Marshall has received generous funding in the form of two grants from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the New England Foundation for the Arts.
In a developmental performance of Rhythm Bath, audiences rolled and sat amongst the dancers (pictured: Nico Gonzales, Bryn Hlava and Runako Campbell) on wheeled chairs. Photo: Lila Hurwitz
The project, entitled Rhythm Bath, is a suite of immersive dance performance-installations that examines questions of inclusion and exclusion within contemporary performance. Informed by her experiences with her neurodiverse adult son and collaboration with those who identify as neurodiverse, Marshall works with set designer Mimi Lien to create performance environments that are welcoming to neurodiverse audiences. Using choreography, textural surfaces, sound, and light, the work encourages different ways of being—where there is no “right” way to be a “good” audience. According to Marshall’s website, the piece aims “to create a level playing field in which a certain way of being in—or controlling—one’s body is not privileged.” The project is co-produced by the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University.
Rhythm Bath has been in the making for some time. A few years ago at Princeton, Marshall formed the interdisciplinary working group “Dancing with Neuromotor Diversity” along with Associate Professor of Theater Brian Herrera and Princeton professors Sabine Kastner (neuroscience) and Naomi Leonard (engineering). They met with experts on neuromotor diversity, individuals who identify as autistic and apraxic, and asked questions such as: “How do you physically experience the architectures and sounds of different spaces?” “What helps you locate your body in space?” This research led to the first iterations of Rhythm Bath and explorations of rhythmic entrainment and interpersonal synchrony—uniquely human traits of neurologically connecting to external rhythms and other’s rhythmic movements. In the performance, the audience may sit, stand, walk, roll in wheeled chairs, vocalize and move freely among the dancers. As they develop performances, the project team prioritizes public engagement and response in the form of surveys, audience talks, classes, and more.
Audiences interact with the set as Junlya Silmon and Miriam Gabriel perform in Rhythm Bath. Photo: Lila Hurwitz
Rhythm Bath has received a grant from The Pew Center for the way in which the project “illuminates timely issues.” The Pew Center is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative, and catalytic work that showcases the region’s cultural vitality and enhances public life, and it engages in an exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders. Pew grants, awarded annually in amounts up to $300,000, are are intended to provide support for artists and organizations in developing new work that in turn plays a vital and necessary role in civic life. In 2022, the center awarded $9.5 million to support 30 organizations and 12 artist fellowships.
From the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), Rhythm Bath has received a National Dance Project Production Grant in the amount of $56,500. Highly competitive, these production grants are awarded annually to only 20 projects to fund the creation and U.S. touring of new dance works led by professional choreographers or dance companies. NEFA has a 40-year history of building pioneering partnerships and programs to support the arts both in New England and beyond.
This summer in a creative residency at PEAK Performances at Montclair State University, the Rhythm Bath project team led by Marshall and Lien spent two weeks experimenting with the choreography and set design, welcoming audience members and neurodiverse thought partners to in-progress showings, and gathering feedback. Throughout the coming year, they will continue to develop and test performance scenarios in residencies in New York City in April and Philadelphia in August. Rhythm Bath will premiere in Philadelphia in September 2023.
Susan Marshall. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor
Marshall has directed the Program in Dance at Princeton since 2009. A choreographer known for employing modest means to resonant effect, her rigorously pared-down vocabularies of movement are finely calibrated into evolving structures. Everyday movement and gesture, distilled to near abstraction, co-exist with full-bodied, athletic movements. Her works use recursive syntax and details of touch, intention, gravity, and gaze to probe the complexities of human behavioral systems and interpersonal relationships. Her work has entered the repertory of major dance companies, including Nederlands Dans Theatre, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Pacific Northwest Ballet. Commissions include dances for Lyon Opera Ballet, Ballet Frankfurt, Ballet Hispanico and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Among her many honors, Marshall is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards. Her dance group Susan Marshall & Company has performed extensively in theaters throughout the United States, Europe and Japan.
