Sara Shelton Mann & Ruth Grauert

Performance As Communication: Making Dance that Speaks

Taught by Sara Shelton Mann & Ruth Grauert

July 1–14, 2012

Participants will create a multimedia piece using sound (concrete and conventional), light (direct and projected), and materials (costume and properties). In addition, each dancer will compose his or her own piece. We will mentor these works and present a concert at the conclusion of the workshop.

The function of art is communication, from creator to viewer. In this workshop, from the warm-up sessions through motion studies to improvisations and composition, all action is designed to move the audience via sentient performance. Through the exploration of duration, shape, space and motion, an articulate body produces dance that moves the viewer.

Being in the Body — We will construct movement with writing, images, and whatever your wont may be, and bring it into performance composed through improvised investigation. You will be absorbed in the magic of creation, dancing, swimming, sharing and eating great food with others. You will perform as you never have before — fully engaged, awake, curious and elegant. We will start the day with “Chi Cultivation”—a series of movement and breathing exercises that articulate the spine, work the muscles, raise physical energy and consciousness, and build strength and vitality.

trained and then performed in the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis companies from 1966 to1972. After directing the Halifax Dance Co-Op in Nova Scotia, she settled in San Francisco.


	Sara Shelton Mann in Redgoldsky Photo: Benji Young

Over the next decade, Sara created her company Contraband and established a complex interdisciplinary performance style and movement vocabulary that significantly influenced the evolution of contemporary dance in the Bay Area.

From 1996 to 1999, she collaborated and toured internationally with Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Since 2000, Mann's creations include: the Monk trilogy: Survival (2000), Feast of Souls (2001), and Beloved (2003); Lotus 695 (2003); Alarma (2007); Télios/Télìos (2006), the Inspirare trilogy (2008), Kalpa 1/my life as a turtle (2009), and Tribes/Zeropoint (2009). Her latest works, Tribes/Dominion (2010) and Zeropoint (2011), are in collaboration with David Szlasa, and premiered at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and ZSpace, San Francisco.

Sara has received five Isadora Duncan Awards (San Francisco), a 2000 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, two CHIME mentorship awards (a project of Margaret Jenkins Dance Company), and an award from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, San Francisco Art Commission, Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco Foundation, American Dance Touring Initiative, and Dance USA. She has held residencies at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as a Wattis Artist; University of California at Davis; Potsdam International Festival of Dance & Theater, Germany; and through Djerassi Artist in Residence Program, California.

holds a B.A. from Ursinus, 1939, and an M.A. from Columbia, 1941. She studied with Holm, Graham, Nikolais, Sokolow, Kashmann, Stewart, and Weidman. She was a member Nikolais Hartford Company, 1942–43; assistant to Nikolais, 1948–1988; stage director for Murray Louis, 1953–1970; lighting designer and stage manager for Phyllis Lamhut, Beverly Blossom, and others, 1948 on; and she taught lighting at the Nik/Lou lab, 1948–1995. She is founder and director of Bearnstow, a summer arts place, from 1946 to present; and has authored numerous articles on general aesthetics, staging, lighting, and Alwin Nikolais (see BearnstowJournal.org). She writes concert and book critiques and poetry. Ruth Grauert is the recipient of the 2005 Martha Hill Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2009 she received a doctor of humane letters from Ursinus College.