SF arts legend to unveil new dance at ODC
When people wistfully describe the 1980s as a golden age for the arts in San Francisco, a time when the city was affordable and anything and everything seemed possible, they’re talking about a creative landscape shaped by Sara Shelton Mann.
The choreographer, performer and teacher arrived in the Bay Area in 1979 with an experimental ethos honed in New York City under the tutelage of pioneering modern dancemaking partners Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis. Working out of her studio by San Francisco’s Project Artaud (rent: $350 a month), she founded the performance group Contraband, which wove together a disparate collection of emerging artists by exploring contact improvisation, spiritual practice and systems of the body.
During its decadelong run, Contraband served as a proving ground for dozens of artists who went on to make a mark in music, dance, circus and visual arts, including Circo Zero Performance’s Keith Hennessy, Gravity’s Jess Curtis, Rinde Eckert, Kim Epifano, Elaine Buckholtz, Julie Kane and Peter Kadyk. Looking back at that heady era and surveying the daunting landscape confronting the arts in San Francisco today, Mann sees not just a sea change in material circumstances, but a shift in consciousness driven by omnipresent technology.
“We have lost something in San Francisco with the increase in noise and traffic and cellphones,” she says. “It seems like cellphones have made it difficult to slow down at all. You’re doing everything all the time.”
Contraband thrived, she says, because people didn’t have to constantly hustle to survive. They had plenty of the most precious resource: time. “I built a class structure where musicians would show up and play,” she says. “There was time to explore improvisation. It was both a collective, and I was a director, and I taught everything I learned from Alwin Nikolais. It was great training for me running an interdisciplinary group. I had to deal with people who wanted to sing and others who wanted to learn how to dance. I had to deal with all these people who wanted to do what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it. They were so strong and individual with such different strengths.”
A master of collaboration, Mann has never stopped exploring new horizons. ODC Theater presents her latest work today through Saturday with the world premiere of “Echo/ Riding the Rapids,” an evening-length investigation into the world of sound that she developed with dancers Anya Cloud and Jesse Zaritt and composer Pamela Z. For the ODC performances, dancers Abby Crain and Jesse Hewit join the work’s creators, moving through a realm populated by signature Mann totems like a chalk-lined stage, white skirts and strategically placed chairs.
Rather than a series of duets, “Echo” is a work about amplified solos. It’s a hybrid piece that explores hidden connections and doppelgangers, “an experiment with putting other people in as an echo effect,” Mann says. “It makes the two soloists carved out even more.”
If there’s a wild card in the mix, it’s composer, vocalist and performer Pamela Z, who performs the score live on stage with her well-honed, real-time digital sound-looping devices. With her extended vocal techniques, she is a study in movement herself, using arresting hand and arm gestures to trigger sound. Mann hadn’t actually seen Z perform solo until workshopping “Echo” in Berlin. “She is wild,” Mann says. “She did a section of her own, and everybody’s mouth dropped open. She’s beautiful in this piece, and I’m wanting her to stretch more. The music is gorgeous, from the guttural to the sexy to raising the rafters, and she’s playing live.”
In much the same way that Z brings a vivid spatial dimension to sound, Mann sees “Echo” as a work about spaces pregnant with possibility, about the suspended beat between a jump and a landing.
“Rather than seeing somebody moving through space, I want to see the space move through the body,” she says. “What is the call and response of listening through space to another person’s movement without just responding to what they’re doing. It’s also a collaboration between audience and performer and happens together through this listening. It’s about the space between the bounce of the ball and when it falls again, the space between thoughts.”
It’s the kind of space that seems ever more hard to find in an environment where there’s nary a pause between information streams.