Research Catalog

Interview with Sara Shelton Mann : Including additional remarks

Title: Interview with Sara Shelton Mann : Including additional remarks, 2021 / Interview conducted remotely by Jesse Zaritt on May 24, 26, and 28, 2021; additional remarks recorded by Sara Shelton Mann on May 30, 2021; Producer: Dance Oral History Project.
Author: Mann, Sara Shelton
Publication: 2021.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Performing Arts Research Collections Dance to submit a request in person.	Film, slide, etc.	Supervised use	*MGZMT 3-3511	Performing Arts Research Collections Dance

Details

Additional Authors

Zaritt, Jesse

Description

3 streaming video files (approximately 5 hours and 21 minutes] : sound, color +
1 audio file (approximately 11 minutes)

Alternative Title

Dance Oral History Project.
Dance Audio Archive.

Subject

Genre/Form

Video recordings.
Oral histories.
Interviews.

Note

Interview with Sara Shelton Mann (in San Francisco, California) conducted remotely by Jesse Zaritt (in Brooklyn, New York) on May 24, 26, and 28, 2021, for the Dance Oral History Project of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; and remarks recorded by Sara Shelton Mann as an addendum to the interview, on May 30, 2021.
For transcript see *MGZMT 3-3511
The video (streaming video files 1-3) and audio (streaming audio file 1) recordings of this interview can be made available at the Library for the Performing Arts by advanced request to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, dance@nypl.org. The video and audio files for this interview are undergoing processing and eventually will be available for streaming.
Title supplied by cataloger.

Access (note)

Photography of the transcript permitted for research purposes only.

Funding (note)

The creation and cataloging of this recording was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, 2021.

Call Number

*MGZMT 3-3511

OCLC

1515689809

Author

Mann, Sara Shelton, interviewee.

Title

Interview with Sara Shelton Mann : Including additional remarks, 2021 / Interview conducted remotely by Jesse Zaritt on May 24, 26, and 28, 2021; additional remarks recorded by Sara Shelton Mann on May 30, 2021; Producer: Dance Oral History Project.

Imprint

2021.

Playing Time

053200

Type of Content

spoken word

two-dimensional moving image

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

video

audio

computer

Type of Carrier

online resource

volume

Digital File Characteristics

video file

audio file

Restricted Access

Photography of the transcript permitted for research purposes only.

Event

Recorded for for the Dance Oral History Project of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts 2021, May 24, 26, and 28 San Francisco (California) and New York (N.Y.).

Summary

Streaming video file 1 (1 hour and 40 minutes), May 24, 2021. Sara Shelton Mann speaks with Jesse Zaritt about how she feels regarding this interview; her childhood including her place and year of birth (Nashville, Tennessee in 1943) and her mother's suicide when Mann was two and a half months old; reminiscences of her rural and lonely childhood; her uncle Neil Lasseter, who became her guardian after she had graduated from high school and sent her to Shorter College [now Shorter University in Rome, Georgia]; the role of religion in her family; her feelings of being an outsider and a loner; her training in piano and the organ as well as her inclination for drawing and writing poetry; the circumstances that led to her uncle's taking over of her guardianship and sending her to college; her mentor Franziska Boas including how they first met; living with Boas and Boas' partner after she was expelled from Shorter; with Boas' encouragement and advice leaving the South to study dance; in 1964 moving to New York and taking classes taught by Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis at the Henry Street Playhouse [Henry Street Settlement] in technique, improvisation, and composition; insights she had while rehearsing in a trio created by Murray, originally for himself, Phyllis Lamhut (Mann's role), and Bill Frank; Nikolais' working methods, in particular his use of voice and other sounds to direct the dancers; the dynamics of the company [Nikolais Dance Theatre] including its cooperative and competitive elements; an anecdote about Ruth Grauert; (briefly) Nikolais as a person; touring with Nikolais in Europe including the many extraordinary experiences and people she encountered; the rigors of touring including the lack of understudies; more on company dynamics including the extent to which she felt she was part of a family; her motivation for dancing; her first piece, Crazy dog events, including its inspiration in the book Shaking the pumpkin [Shaking the pumpkin; traditional poetry of the Indian North Americas, by Jerome Rothenberg, 1972]; her "god" Solo, which she performed at the 1967 world's fair in Montreal [The 1967 International and Universal Exposition, also known as Expo 67]; her path from student [at the Henry Street Settlement] to understudy to company member; some of the other members of the company at the time including Raymond Johnson; her insight that she had to go beyond style and search for the truth of the body; training with other teachers including Merce Cunningham and Erick Hawkins; joining the new company started by Louis [Murray Louis Dance Company; in 1989 Louis and Nikolais created the combined company Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance]; after quitting Louis' company spending a year observing all kinds of dance as well as a martial arts performance that deeply impressed her; reminiscences of life in New York City including some of the places she lived; what she means by transparency including how it relates to performing in a space full of other people; her exploration of techniques and styles during her time with Nikolais and Louis; how touring influenced her own creative process; her reasons for leaving Louis' company and the aftermath; undergoing an emotional crisis from which she emerged deciding that she wanted to live and including her eventual return to dance; studying with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen; how what she learned from Cohen transformed what she had previously thought about technique; what she sought in her own self-training sessions including how to fall before the fall, how to cheat time and space, and how to exit the physical body; her father including why she thinks it was fortunate that he was not part of her life; her feelings about being alone, relationships with men, being female, and freedom; reasons she continues to devote her life's energies to dancing; reflections on her time in New York.

Streaming video file 2 (1 hour and 49 minutes), May 26, 2021. Sara Shelton Mann reads aloud an email she had written and sent to Jesse Zaritt the previous evening; she speaks with Zaritt about her impressions of Judson Church [Judson Dance Theater] and some of the post-modern dance she saw in New York including Trisha Brown's Walking on the wall and Yvonne Rainer's Trio A; her reasons for leaving New York (in 1971, when she was 28) and accepting an invitation to help develop the Halifax Dance Co-op, in Nova Scotia, Canada; working with the company in Halifax as well as touring throughout Canada; how the circumstance that performances were typically held in galleries (rather than conventional theaters) became a source of creativity; the physical vocabulary she was using at this time including contact improvisation; her attempt to use both technique and improvisation in her work; some of the dancers she worked with including Diane Moore and Randy Glyn; what it was like to live in Halifax at this time, especially during the winter; her focus at that time on how to use specific sites and props; Jennifer Mascall including how they first met and a collaborative work in which they were strapped to a seesaw; the circumstances that led to an invitation from Mangrove to teach in San Francisco (California); after arriving in California (in 1979) moving into the Project Artaud and visiting various places with Mangrove including the Esalen Institute; (briefly) later studying at Esalen with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen; her relationship with Mangrove including her romantic relationship with Byron Brown; the formation of Mixed Bag Productions with the addition of herself and Freddie Long to the group; (very briefly) the influence of the theater group, the Blake Street Hawkeyes; continuing to make her own work while she was with Mangrove; collaborating with Keith Hennessy among others in the work Evol; her studies with [A.] Hameed Ali [also known as H.A. Almaas] including how his teachings influenced the structure of her own group, Contraband; individual strengths of some of the Contraband members; the space in Project Artaud where they performed; raising funds together with Krissy Keefer and Dance Brigade; her beginning to look more deeply into individual performers' strengths and personalities and explore how they could be conveyed to the audience; her increasingly severe physical injuries that she related to living in Project Artaud; the relationship of titling her works to her choreographic process; the dynamic relationship of technique and improvisation; the period (1979 to 1985) between the dissolution of Mangrove, the forming of Contraband (doing business as Mixed Bag Productions), and the creation of the Contraband work Evol; after the dissolution of Mangrove, marrying Byron Brown, in particular her instantly realizing that this was a mistake; suffering a serious head wound in a car accident (in 1980) and her convalescence; obtaining a professional agent for Contraband (San Francisco International Management, later Circuit Network); some of Contraband's works including (Invisible) war (which they toured in Italy), and Oracle; cleaning up a burnt-out building on Valencia [Street] and 16th [Street] and performing Religare, a series of solos, in the empty rooms; cleaning up and performing at other sites; more on Religare including some performance details; the multidisciplinary nature of the group's collaborations; the challenges this presented for her as director; how the fact that she is a collaborator and process person has determined what she looks for in her co-performers; the Mira-cycles (Mira-cycle I, Mira-cycle II, and Mira-cycle III), including their roots in her trip to Paliku on Maui Island (Hawaii) as well as her longstanding interest in Rumi, Kabir [Das], and Mirabai; her use of Robert Bly's translation of six Mirabai poems in the Mira cycles; Bly's withdrawal of his approval [to use his translations] upon seeing a videotape of a performance; her spiritual studies with Andrew Cohen including their trip to India; after studying with Cohen finding herself having to relearn how to teach the ecstatic workshops and classes she had built after studying with Cohen and Ali; some of the underlying concepts of Mira-cycle I; various aspects of the work's content and staging; her composer/collaborator Norman Rutherford and his creation of home-made instruments including an anecdote about his using the hides of road kill to make drums; the Mira-cycles as the telling of her life story; the seven-year period of their creation including the mistakes she made regarding people and money during this time; Mira-cycle II including who was in the cast and some performance details; the fraught atmosphere and dissension within the group at this time; Mira-cycle III including her emotional state at the time and questioning of herself as an artist and spiritual seeker; the ecstatic ending of Mira-cycle III.

Streaming video file 3 (1 hour and 52 minutes), May 28, 2021. Sara Shelton Mann speaks with Jesse Zaritt about Mira-cycle II, in particular her being instructed in a dream to switch sections and how this led to her suffering a serious injury in performance; other traumatic injuries and illnesses she has suffered to her body and psyche and the various healing methods she has employed including Tibetan Buddhist training with Togdan Rinpoche; her work with Guillermo Gómez-Peña as a transition away from the pain of the dissolution of Contraband (in 1996); first working with Gómez-Peña in Mexico City (Mexico) in particular what she learned from condensing a whole-stage solo she had made at Djerassi [Djerassi Resident Artists Program, in Woodside, California] into an eight-foot diorama; the training she received from Gómez-Peña on the use of text including how this transformed her performance of Tea ceremony; her making performance art and writing at Djerassi during the off-season in winter; her straitened financial circumstances arising from her decision to pay off [Contraband's] debts rather than declare bankruptcy; her decision to become a healer including her instant affinity for dowsing; during this period engaging in various activities including the study of Qigong and exploring the boundaries between meditation and prayer; beginning to choreograph again, at the request of Kathleen Hermesdorf; the [2007-2008] trilogy Inspirare (Inspirare, Redgoldsky, and Te'lios/Telio's), a collaboration with the performers Hermesdorf and Maria F. Scaroni, the sound designer Calvin LL. Jones, and the video and light designer, David Szlasa; John O'Keefe and how he helped her with the writing of texts; around this time collaborating with Krissy Keefer and the Dance Brigade on a program [The Great Liberation Upon Hearing, in 2009]; her solos in the program, including one about her (imagined) life as a pig and a second about being the most beautiful girl in the world, set to a Johnny Cash song ["Ballad of a Teenage Queen"]; her work Tribes [Zeropoint, Dominion, Unified field], in particular, Zeropoint including the insight she had about the blurring of the boundaries of performance and rehearsal while working on this piece; her experience with a group of people she gathered at a residency at U.C. Davis [University of California, Davis] to work on Zeropoint as illustrative of the relationship between training and making; her having had to train performers, even in Contraband in certain aspects of performance; how her reconsidering of the relationship among the visual, the aural, and movement has influenced her work; her work Out of the box (which she created in Berlin, in 2011); the six-year period when she was "pulling" solos out of performers while she acted as the provocateur; the movement practice process she developed during this time (arising out of her earlier work with a psychic); insights regarding herself as a teacher including the realization that she did not need to explain herself; training she used in the cultivation of her inner teacher and how she has applied aspects of this training in class; other training methods she developed including forms to help the students write; some of her peripheral roles on stage following her decision (after a serious on stage accident) never to perform again; her return to performing including in Sara (the smuggler), which was created in collaboration with Hennessy and Rutherford; her relationship with the audience; her teaching of implied direction; her career-retrospective work Erasing time, including the participation of former Contraband members and current students, the inclusion of portions of Mira-cycle I, and the use of archival video footage; the stage as her home; her continuing study of healing trainings; reasons she loves working with people; Echo, the solo she made with Zaritt; the mindset necessary to benefit from her training; reflections on her students' incorporation of what she has taught them into their own development; her desire to create [site-specific] work in galleries again; some recent exercises and experiments including the use of an unlit space; finding balance between improvisation and composition and technique, both in her work and in her life; ideas she has for a putative gallery work; her recognition of the gap between an idea and its physical manifestation.

Streaming audio file 1 (approximately 11 minutes), May 30, 2021. Responding to an email from the interviewer Jesse Zaritt, Sara Shelton speaks further about her work and process including her solo Beloved, Monk at the Met, and (Invisible) war; her study of choreographers including Eiko and Koma and Pina Bausch whom she considers the artist of the tease; her impressions of Bausch and her work; brainstorms about future projects for her, Zaritt, and others.

Funding

The creation and cataloging of this recording was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, 2021.

Added Author

Zaritt, Jesse, interviewer.

Research Call Number

*MGZMT 3-3511

*MGZDOH 3511

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