(l-r: Ruttenberg, Marshall, Baldwin, Castro)

About the 2006 Sugar Salon Participants:

Susan Marshall (Sugar Salon Mentor Artist) has created over thirty-five dance works in collaboration with the dancers of Susan Marshall & Company, including Cloudless, The Most Dangerous Room in the House, Spectators at an Event, Fields of View, Arms, Interior with Seven Figures, and Kiss. Since 1982, Susan Marshall & Company has performed in theaters throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Far East, including international festivals such as Edinburgh International Festival, Festival International de Nouvelle Danse, Spoleto Festival, the American Dance Festival, the Los Angeles Festival, Vienna Tanz, Springdance Festival, Pepsico Summerfare, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.

In 1996 Marshall collaborated with Philip Glass to create the dance/opera Les Enfants Terribles, which traveled to thirty-six cities in Europe and the United States. Marshall has also created dances for the Lyon Opera Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Boston Ballet, and Montreal Danse. Her aerial duet, Kiss, is in the repertory of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Pacific Northwest Ballet. Marshall has choreographed dances in operas staged by Los Angeles Music Center and New York City Opera.

A 2000 recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, Marshall has also received a Dance Magazine Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Brandeis University Creative Arts Citation, the American Choreographer Award and two NYSCA fellowships. Since 1985, Marshall, her artistic collaborators and her company members, have received a total of nine New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessie Awards) for their artistic achievements. For more information on Marshall and the company, visit www.susanmarshallandcompany.org.

Susan Marshall & Company's next performance in New York will be a return engagement of Cloudless at Dance Theater Workshop, January 23 -- February 3, 2007. Ms. Marshall wishes to thank Marisa Beatty, Mary Cochran and the artists of the Sugar Salon for this enriching opportunity.

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Since forming her company, Ivy Baldwin Dance, in 1999, Ms. Baldwin has been presented by many theaters, including Dance Theater Workshop, Lincoln Center, Dixon Place, Danspace Project, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Long Island University, Washington University (MO), DanceOff!, and Symphony Space, to just name a few. Ms. Baldwin has been extremely fortunate to receive funding multiple times from both the Puffin Foundation and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. In 2003 Ms. Baldwin participated as a choreographer at The Yard during the Bessie Schönberg Residency. The Company has enjoyed creative residencies through Dragon's Egg in CT., Nazareth Dance Academy in NY and the Williamsburg Art Nexus's Sugar Salon creative residency at Barnard College in NYC. Most recently her company performed Gone Missing (a Bessie Schönberg/First Light Commission from Dance Theater Workshop with funds from the Jerome Foundation) for DTW's spring '06 season. John Rockwell of The New York Times called the work "so smart and so well executed and so full of stimulating invitations for thought..." Upcoming performances include Lincoln Center Out of Doors, CATCH performance series in Brooklyn and the premier of It's Only Me, a Mondo Cane! commission for Dixon Place's spring season 2007.

Ms. Baldwin is a graduate of both the North Carolina School of the Arts and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts MFA program. She has also enjoyed performing with Impetuous Theater Group, Jeanne Schickler, Alexander Gish, Tap Fusion and Melissa Briggs Dance. Teaching credits include Valdosta State University, The Yard, Nazareth Dance Academy and Long Island University. For more information about the Company please visit www.ivybaldwindance.com.

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Puerto-Rican born choreographer Yanira Castro is the director of Yanira Castro + Company, a New York-based ensemble of dancers and designers that fuses experiments in movement with original music, costumes and installations. The Company develops unique environments for their dances, constructing installations that transform traditional venues or highlight unconventional sites. Her work has been presented in a variety of venues in New York including: Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, HERE, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Dixon Place. Most recently, Castro has been working on site-based dance installation projects. Beacon (2005) was presented by DTW and the Brooklyn Lyceum at a 4,000 square foot former public bathhouse and Cartography (2002) was presented by XØ: Projects Inc. at the Old American Can Factory. Other installation works include 2:1 (2000) and The First of All Hacks (2004) commissioned by Peculiar Works Project for Judson House and an abandoned office floor respectively. The Company has been presented out of state at Dance Place in Washington, DC; Amherst College in Massachusetts; and The University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. Castro received her B.A. in Theater & Dance and Literature from Amherst College. She has been recognized with awards from The Multi-Arts Production Fund, the New York Foundation for the Arts' Building Up Infrastructure Levels for Dance (BUILD), Meet the Composer's Commissioning Music/USA program, the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, and three Manhattan Community Arts Fund grants. She also received a Bessie Schönberg/First Light Commission from DTW with funds from the Jerome Foundation, and a Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation for a residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy. Upcoming projects include two dance installations: Center of Sleep to premiere at DTW in fall 2007 and (fetus)twin to premiere at the Chocolate Factory Theater, October 19-21, 2006. For more information on the Company, please visit www.yaniracastrocompany.org.

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Dana Ruttenberg is an Israeli born dancer and choreographer. She graduated from The Bat-Dor School of Dance, the Thelma Yelin High School for Performing Arts and holds a B.A. in Dance from Barnard College, Columbia University, Magna Cum Laude. As artistic director of her NY based dance troupe, The Red Hill Project, she had created works that showcased at venues including Dancenow/NYC, Joyce Soho, Mulberry Theater's Newsteps Festival, University Settlement, Minor Latham Playhouse, White Wave, and Toronto Fringe Festival, among others. Since her return to Israel 2 years ago, she has been teaching, giving workshops and choreographing for such venues as the Batsheva Dance Ensemble, OtherDance Festival, and IntimaDance Festival, to name a few. She also continues to create choreography for Theater Productions.

Ms. Ruttenberg strives to find the delicate balance between authentic theatrical action and the pleasure of complex movement made easy. Combining improvised and fully choreographed moments in her work, she sculpts the spontaneous, and maintain the known-and-planned always crisp and fresh, and open for real-time gut reaction. In my subject matter, she seeks to describe and reflect a cynical, satiated mental state of the urban man/woman; socially, physically, and culturally bombarded from all directions by media, architecture, and exposed to a sped-up pace of living, bringing to the stage the high-strung nerves, the fast beat and the exhaustion that surround it all.

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2006 Sugar Salon Performance:

Susan Marshall & Company presented the first in a series of video/dance works inspired by "Frame Dance," a portion of Cloudless, the company's most recent, critically acclaimed stage work. Like Frame Dance, this Sugar Salon premiere features dancers choreographed in prone positions within the constraint of an eight-foot-square frame, while live videotape of in-frame action is projected onto a framed screen. These simultaneous, alternative views of the dance warp the audience's sense of perspective and space. The clearly delineated boundaries restrict performers' movements and create a confined world rich with metaphoric possibilities.

Ivy Baldwin Dance premiered an excerpt of It's Only Me, set to an original score by Justin Jones, which explores a range of themes from attachment and loss to violence and intimacy. Inspired by the thought that "If it is only you, then there is nothing for anyone to be afraid of," It's Only Me is a dark, intimate, funny, and sometimes dangerous work. A quartet for company members Lawrence Cassella, Taryn Griggs, Erin Owen, and Colin Stillwell, It's Only Me additionally has been commissioned by Dance New Amsterdam to be developed into an evening length performance in March 2007.

Yanira Castro premiered Happy, Too Happy, inspired by the psychological and biological connections between sleep and gestation. The work explores the process of transformation: sleep as an enclosed neurological activity that resembles, in state, a cocoon, and adolescence as a period of metamorphosis - simultaneously grandiose, awkward and innocent. A quartet for Peggy Cheng, Luke Miller, Heather Olson, and Joseph Poulsen, composer Stephan Moore's score tracks the performers through obscured fragments composed of obsessive rhythms, repetitions of pop music, and sudden bursts of noise. Additionally commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop, Yanira Castro + Company will premiere an evening length elaboration of the work, Center of Sleep, in fall 2007.

*Center of Sleep is commissioned as part of a national series of works from Meet the Composer's Commissioning Music/USA program, which is made possible by generous support from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Francis Goelet Trust, the Helen F. Whitaker Fund, Target, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Stimulated by her recent return to NY after a two year absence, Israelie choreographer Dana Ruttenberg derived inspiration for Pixels on the Rocks from concepts of reunion and return. Coming face to face with the past, her exploration originates with the notion that people take on several identities over time - all of whom continue to exist within the individual, surfacing at different times and for different reasons. Using pace, physicality and spatial relationships to evoke images of the metropolis - times square at rush hour, dozens of windows on a high-rise, a crowded subway - Ms. Ruttenberg tackles the question: Is there a "default self?".

Photo Gallery Coming Soon...

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