For Dancemaker, Darkness Amid the Light

Take a look at Susan Shields -- with her corn-silk blond hair, her robin's-egg blue eyes and perfect, pearly white teeth -- you'd think she lives a charmed life. She's a dancer with impeccable credentials: the Washington Ballet, Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Group and, in the finale of her performing career, Mikhail Baryshnikov's modern repertory troupe, White Oak Dance Project. She recently remarried and is the mother of a 6-year-old son.

But looks can deceive, and Shields's warm smile masks a tragedy that brought her to her knees about three years ago: her first husband's death. It was dance, however, her first love, that helped mend her spirit and helped her feel whole again. On Saturday, the Center for the Arts at George Mason University, where Shields is a professor in the dance department, will stage an evening devoted to her choreography. "Susan Shields Ballet Cocktail" brings together five major ballet companies from Boston, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, the District (the Washington Ballet) and Richmond in a shared bill of works by a single choreographer.

In a program filled with such upbeat works as the quicksilver "Concerto Caprice," danced by the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre; the warm and cheerful "Sunlit Song," with Boston Ballet II; and the cartoonish "I {heart} Kenji," performed by the American Repertory Ballet, Shields's "Dark Hugs Me Hard" is an unflinching study of loss and grief. Created with the Richmond Ballet last summer, the work came from deep within as Shields was beginning to take small steps toward healing after the unexpected death of her husband in 2003.

"I didn't want to touch that grief, so I waited," she says, tearing up. "And I also knew I needed to do it, to get it out. It was a terrible time." Shields, 40, is reluctant to discuss details of his death and says: "I'm not in this to re-create painful realities. I'm not that kind of choreographer, at least not now."

The work isn't about Shields's late husband specifically; it's an examination of her struggle to come to terms with the death of a beloved. The work, she says, transcends her specific loss and touches on grief on a human scale that everyone encounters at some point.

The studios of the Richmond Ballet became her safe haven as she was choreographing the dance. "Dancers there gave so much of themselves," Shields says. "I felt safe around these dancers. I felt like they were with me." She tells of one day in rehearsal when one of the dancers, who lost her father at a young age, broke down and began crying. "I was so moved by her own loss. . . . I told the dancers, 'I know you have each suffered losses on some level.' "

After the premiere in Richmond, where the work was praised for its compelling imagery, Shields was asked whether she felt any better. She says she replied: "No, I don't. I feel like I did what needed to come out. It's like a physical wound . . . you learn to live with the scar."

Shields says she never intended to choreograph when she embarked on her career as a dancer. A graduate of James Madison High School in Vienna, she apprenticed with the Washington Ballet under founder Mary Day before she was 18. She left ballet for modern dance and was dancing professionally in New York by the time she was 20. But her best if-they-could-see-me-now moment came after she moved back to Northern Virginia to teach at George Mason University. Out of the blue, Baryshnikov called and invited her to join his White Oak Dance Project. She took a leave of absence and left for New York.

(Shields worked with Baryshnikov on and off from 1998 through 2000.)

"I was rehearsing Mark [Morris's] 'The Argument' with Mischa [Baryshnikov]," Shields says. "Being in the New York State Theater studios with Mark and Mischa and Jessica Lange, who happened to be watching, and me, the little girl from Vienna, Virginia. . . . Wow! I took a moment and said to myself, 'Oh, my God.' It was very cool."

Susan Shields Ballet Cocktail George Mason University Center for the Arts 888-945-2468 Saturday