Sara Shelton
Mann
Granada Artist-in-Residence
Sara Shelton Mann has taught, performed and created performance since 1967. A protegee of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, she has studied dance with Erik Hawkins, Cliff Keuter, Merce Cunningham, Brynar Mehl, Andrew Harwood, and balanced her training by studying QiQong with Master Qi Yang Ma and Master Zi Sheng Wang, the work of Hameed Ali (study of human essence, The Diamond Work), Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (Body-Mind Centering), Ellen Fishburn (Giving Spirit Form), Maria Sauer Holloman, spiritual massage, Desda Zuckerman, Leslie Temple Thurston, (Spiritual Warrior Training), Master Zhi Gang Sha (Institute of Soul Mind Body Medicine). She is an ongoing student of dowsing and specific healing modalities. She is a certified Master NLP Practitioner.
During the seventies, she was artistic director of the Halifax Dance Co-Op in Nova Scotia. She premiered her original work at Dance in Canada from 1976-1978 and at the Toronto Theatre Festival in 1981. In 1979, she formed CONTRABAND, a group of collaborative artists dedicated to the evolution of an interdisciplinary dance vision. In 1985 CONTRABAND created Evol and over the next decade, under her direction, the company staged seven major, full-evening works: Religare, the Invisible War, Oracle, Mandala, Mira-Cycle I, Mira-Cycle II... The Fall, and Return to Ordinary Life: Mira-Cycle III. The Mira Cycles is a dance/performance epic comprising three full-length works based on the life of 16th century Indian poet, politician and saint, Mirabai. This trilogy represented the creation of a complex interdisciplinary performance style and the development of a dance vocabulary that significantly influenced the evolution of contemporary Bay Area dance.
From 1996 to 1999, Mann collaborated with MacArthur "Genius" Guillermo Gomez-Pena in a series of interdisciplinary performance installations based more in theater than in dance and toured them throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe These works included Dangerous Border Games, Museum of Frozen Identity, The Mexterminator Project, and Borderscape 2000. Mann began the "Monk" trilogy (Survival, Feast of Souls, and Beloved) with "Community Performance Extravaganza" in May 2000 at Dance Mission, a community based work with 44 performers and 17 live musicians. Monk at the Met: Survival was staged at ODC Performance Space in December through a partnership with NEFA/National Dance Project. Monk at the Met: Feast of Souls was created in 2001 and performed at ODC Theater in 2001, Dance Mission in 2002 and toured to UC Riverside and The Dance Center at Columbia College, Chicago in 2003. She presented Monk at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in October, 2003 through a Wattis Artist-In-Residence Award. Most recently, in December 2003 Mann created and presented Lotus 695 in Halilfax, Nova Scotia, through a special creation-based residency sponsored by Live Art Productions.
Ms. Mann has received a Choreographer's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, Emerging Choreographer award from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Art Commission and four Isadora Duncan Dance Awards. Ms. Mann also received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography for year 2000. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, San Francisco Grants for the Arts/Hotel Tax Fund, Meet the Composer, The Flow Fund, Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco Foundation, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, American Dance Touring Initiative (Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund), among others. Her choreographic works have been commissioned by Cal Performances at the University of California at Berkeley; Dance Place in Washington, DC; Theater Artaud, San Francisco; Wexner Center in Columbus, OH; the National Performance Network, a project of Dance Theatre Workshop in New York; Robert Moses Kin in San Francisco; Live Art Productions in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She received a Wattis Artist-In-Residence Program at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Dance USA grant for “Sky” presented by SFIAF, SFAC Individual grant and Dance USA/Irvine for “Telios/Telios 2007. It was awarded 1 of 10 best dance performances in S.F. 2006 SF Chronicle. She has just completed Tribes/icebreak Feb. 09, Tribes – Kalpa1/my life as a turtle in San Diego, April 09 and Tribes/Zeropoint - international group project for Tanztage, Internationales Festival for Dance and Performance May 09.
As UC Davis Granada Artist-in-Residence she will stage Tribes: the unified field. Her next San Francisco project is in collaboration with David Szlasa at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, funded by the Gerbode Foundation and CASH.
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