As if the needle on a phonograph record were skipping, the familiar Beethoven score was randomly interrupted from time to time. Jesse Zaritt’s athletic spread-across-the-floor solo dancing seemed unaware of the radio silence. When the score was audible his body was animated by its meter. When all went silent he kept at it, without missing a beat. He was clearly “dancing to the beat of a different drummer”, as we say.
A similar inner drumbeat seemed to motor the entire ensemble. Seated in a horseshoe— some of us in chairs and others on pillows on the floor— we were all up close to what often felt like a purposeful immersion in cacophony. The soundscape changed— sometimes melodic, sometimes metallic, and at other times melodic with electronic dueling for our ears. One after another dancer poured on to the floor (stage) for their moment in the sun. We felt as much as saw a common thread. From the outside it appeared to be a focus on performing full body gestures in sync with the beat. Meanwhile, a fellow dancer with chalk in hand actively scrawled on the floor, looking up at the dancer to channel the energy and gestures before them. A tinkling bell would signal a scene change, or the end of narration and other vocals. The floor scribbles kept expanding to all edges of the performance space. Eventually the boundaries between floor and dancers were blurred, as the dancers picked up the chalk floor patterns on to their clothing.
Sara Shelton Mann Workshops Her Performance Art Vocabularies at American Dance Festival
The ensemble were newbies to this performance art flavored dance. Sara Shelton Mann and Jesse Zaritt had been teaching them the ropes in an ADF (American Dance Festival) workshop in the prior week. Mann’s monologue urging the dancers (and us) to lose all notions of our cultural selves to find something new jumped out of her run on word salad opener. Later, when she emerged from the shadows on to centerstage Mann was far more direct. She posed the question— Can you hear the bombs on the other side of the planet??, averring that she could.
It was Mann’s job also to move our attention to the objects-to-be-found pile on the stage— confetti, bustelo coffee can, exercise bands and more. For this reviewer, this pile of objet d’random was emblematic of the work as a whole. For the dancers they might be talismans. For us they never rise to the level of props used in a more studied dance or theater piece.
Slider Photos by Peter Kachergis — Co-Publisher; Travel Photographer
If you are a fan of performance art in theater Sara Shelton Mann’s performance art dance offering is not- miss material. If you instead prefer choreography exhaustively compiled with the audience, not the performer, front of mind, this might not be your cup of tea.
Slider Photos by Robbie Sweeny
