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Juxtaposition : A Dialogue Between Practices
with Sara Shelton Mann

This is a collaborative workshop proposition from two-practitioners who place the experience of the body at the centre of their dance practices.

Proto-technique class by Malcolm Manning

This is a process-oriented dance class focused on how we experience ourselves moving and how we imagine ourselves into being. The invitation is to enter into a perceptual dialogue with ourselves in which we become the experts of our own experience.

The aim is to develop self-awareness as a tool for creating and refining our own dance practices. The impossibility of a purely physical training is assumed from the start and the class also encourages critical and conceptual interrogation of the many discourses that shape our experience. It is a class about dancing in context.

It includes material from experiential anatomy, ideokinesis and the Feldenkrais Method and is part interactive lecture, part guided and part open movement exploration. The continual mapping of movements back to the simple acts of standing and walking means the material is approachable and useful for anyone.

The Body Process by Sara Shelton Mann

Working deeply into the body though breath and chi cultivation we begin to explore habits and open windows of perceptual information into movement exploration. We do inter-disciplinary performative research as well as explore energetic states of being that both inform and acknowledge your magic and wisdom.

Improvisation will be the medium through which we explore. Using exercises that create exchanges of roles, scenarios, time frames and spacial constructs, we engage the muscles of imagination to build pictures and bridges, create stories and erase them.

The visual field follows attention, awareness creates possibility, imagination explores content and writing develops enthusiasm. Joy is always there when in play together. Come dance, write, view, remote view, track the seen and the imagined. Wake up. Explore the world you create as you create it. Simplicity is the antidote to glamour.


Sara Shelton Mann is an already legendary dance artist whose choreography and teaching has played a significant role in shaping contemporary dance performance aesthetics and choreographic process. Her protégés (Curtis, Epiphano, Hennessy, Hermesdorf, de Hoyos, Erdman, among many others…) tour internationally.

Herself a protégé of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Lewis in NYC in the 60s, Sara was also deeply influenced by Contact Improvisation. From 1979-96 Sara directed Contraband, a ground breaking troupe of artists working at the leading edges of contemporary dance, performance, ritual, and music. She has received five Isadora Duncan Awards and was a Guggenheim Fellow in Choreography in 2000.

Sara collaborated and toured internationally with Guillermo Gomez-Pena 96-99 and has created commissioned work across the US, in Europe and Russia as well as at UC Davis and other universities. Sara’s work has been supported by Djerassi Artist in Residence Programs, ODC commissions, NEA, NEFA, SFAC, SFF, Zellerbach Family and Gerbode Foundations.

For more about Sara visit www.sarasheltonmann.org


Upcoming workshops