Susan Marshall's 'Sawdust Palace,' Where Surreal Dreams of Love Unfold

Sensuality on the move -- and occasionally on the wing -- was the theme of Susan Marshall's "Sawdust Palace," a rambling but darkly charming work that seemed to ignite from this premise: Put five uninhibited dancers into a cabaret space with a pianist and a trapeze rig, and watch what happens.

In this case, it's 90 minutes of deadpan but decidedly oddball interactions, colored by unsheathed physicality and tight-lipped, random passions (continuing through tomorrow at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center). Imagine outtakes of Fellini's most surreal moments crossed with vaudeville on Viagra, and you've got the idea.

There's a pungent sense of nostalgia at work here, and it stems from the last-century origins of this work. Choreographer Marshall was inspired by the European spiegeltent ("mirror tent") of the early 1900s, a collapsible cabaret-dance hall-saloon that took its name from the mirrors that festooned its canvas walls and brought flirtatious patrons within winking distance of one another. With these tents, a movable feast of fin-de-siecle entertainment could be delivered to the provinces. On a good night you might catch Marlene Dietrich or Josephine Baker performing within. (The concept wasn't restricted to Europe; in "My Antonia," Willa Cather describes the pleasures and perils of a dancing pavilion in a tent, set up one summer in Nebraska by enterprising Italians.)

In keeping with the cabaret idea, "Sawdust Palace's" audience found fruit and chocolates on offer outside the center's small Kogod Theatre, which had been transformed into a tented theater-in-the-round, draped in crimson swags and strings of lights. Cafe tables and rows of seats ringed the elevated stage. The genteel dessert-party trappings aside, Marshall wasted no time setting an erotic tone: Pianist Alexander Rovang opened the show by playing Elgar's "Salut d'Amour" on a clunky-sounding upright with dancer Kristen Hollinsworth in his lap, her legs amorously wrapped around his waist. This idea is expanded later, when another dancer, Petra van Noort, straddles the keyboard with Rovang's sheet music stuck to her rump. Rovang, oblivious to the invitation staring him in the face, sticks to the Elgar.

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. When one dancer straps on the trapeze harness to, say, mop the floor (upside down) after another one goes a little nuts with a water pitcher, it's done with a sleepwalker's earnestness and inattention.

The best scenes have a narrative arc, however brief: In one, dancer Joseph Poulson, wearing a long white apron, is courted by Hollinsworth doing a chicken dance in heels and a bustier trimmed in white feathers. Is he enchanted by her curves, her legs? No, butcher that he is, it's the feathers that turn him on, and as he pulls her onto his lap and hungrily plucks out fistfuls of fluff, they both succumb to orgiastic ecstasy under a shower of goosedown.

It isn't always a seamless experience, however. A self-conscious archness creeps into the work in spots, especially when the dancers climb off the stage and interact stiffly with the audience. At another awkward point halfway through the evening, the dancers come out one by one to take bows, bewildering a crowd that wonders why it's clapping prematurely. "Sawdust Palace" may not be the sturdiest piece of theater, but in its finest moments it's a lovely place for dreams.

This program, commissioned by the University of Maryland and Bard College, repeats tonight, tomorrow afternoon and tomorrow evening.