5 Questions for Christine Bonansea

MEET THE PERFORMERS:  5 QUESTIONS
Performer in Hybrid 2, Nov 2–3, 2013

What training systems, teachers, or other experiences have contributed to the way you perform, and how you think about performing?

I feel I’ve always danced, since my young age; learning a great diversity of movement techniques for performance stages. I’ve practiced ballet, Modern, Jazz, African, contact improvisation and additional somatic or experimental forms for specific projects. I have been pursuing my research and developing my work as a professional dancer and choreographer throughout the years in international scenes studying at the National Choreographic Center in France and performing for a number of companies. I had the chance to experience the work of master artists such as Mathilde Monnier, Mark Tompkins, Regine Chopinot, Catherine Diverres, Thierry Bae, Nancy Stark Smith, Louise Burns, Faustin Linyekela, Ralph Lemon, Tino Seghal, Sara Shelton Mann, Nita Little, Katie Duck among others who fed my practice and develop continuously new questions toward the performance form.

What are you currently reading, listening to, and/or watching?
My work covers a broad artistic field elaborated in collaboration with musician composers, visual artists. I follow composers and musician performers from the Bay Area and from Europe. The bay area scene is really inspiring, full of talented and sensitive artists. I listen to their music a lot; go to their concerts as much as I can and collaborate with them for my pieces and for performance improvisations series that I curate or participate (SONIC BODY SERIES). I read and look at any visual information that will feed my interest and my research. My current read is: “a briefer history of time” by Stephen Hawking and 187 ILLUSIONS from Scientific American MIND magazine.

What is your favorite thing to cook and eat right now?
Coming back from Japan, I just love the rice cookies so much right now, but my delicacy is always a tasty bread with cheese and wine. I like cooking, but I have never much time for sophisticated meals!

What is one thing working with Sara has taught you?
Sara is creating a container of energetic creativity. Her artistry has been influencing numbers of artists who worked for her for years. I found her impact on my artistic voice really sensitive. ONE THING…I’ve been being more instinctive, trust my inner voice to rediscover the potential of each time, each space. It opens a lot of possibilities.

What is/are your day job(s)? Besides actually feeding you, how do(es) it/they feed your life in performance?
I have at least 5 jobs! Each job informs or challenges my everyday world: dancer, choreographer, mother, dance medicine therapist and teacher. In all of them, the availability and humility is an everyday practice. There is no regular day or schedule. Then, the ability to be ready for any change, to be present, to improvise, or find the appropriate response defines my lifestyle. I believe this constant adaptability serves my performance practice and my creativity.

HYBRID 2 – Nov 2 & 3, 2013
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5 questions from Jennie MaryTai Liu

Jesse Hewit

MEET THE PERFORMERS:  5 QUESTIONS

JESSE HEWIT
Performer in Hybrid 2, Nov 2 & 3, 2013

What training systems, teachers, or other experiences have contributed to the way you perform, and how you think about performing?
Sara Mann composes images in a pretty staggering way, and it has brought me back to a very curiosity-driven, very open-ended way of TRYING anything and everything. I practice making like Sara. She follows her sense of clarity, and it doesn’t often follow logic or trend or narrative. Sara uses imagistic nuances of connection and association in a very deep and mystical way. Working with her is incredible training.

I also like aerobics. I like doing hard and repetitive things that feel athletic and punchy. it brings me back from a strange ether that i often occupy when I’m making. And it let’s me play with simple systems of pushing my body. I like letting it show when something is hard, or joyful, or confusing, when I perform.

Amara Tabor Smith is another maker who guides how I perform. Amara often performs for dead people, and I find this to be really useful. For me, there’s just so much ancestor spirit action, swirling around everything we do, so it’s very useful and purposeful to just connect to someone who might not be right “there,” and let yourself be an appropriate channel for them. I find that every time I perform (which is a lot lately), I can easily find intense purpose, if I just let the dead folks in.

I have found great teachers in Meg Stuart, Keith Hennessy, and Robert Steijn.

Lastly, my recent collaborator, Laura Arrington, and I were working in an old gymnasium out at Headlands Center for the Arts, this past spring, and we were doing all these really slight and specific presence exercises; playing with doing nothing, etc. And at one point, she said to me: “Don’t manage anything.” This has been with me since. The practice of not managing anything, while still executing scores in a performance…..is powerful. Try it.

What are you currently reading, listening to, and/or watching?
I am reading GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND because I am in a book group and we’re meeting this Monday to discuss this book! It’s pretty engrossing so far. I’m somehow allergic to scholarly tones in writing, and Sarah Schulman is keeping me interested in what she thinks. I’m listening to the pandora station of Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown! and I’m watching about 3 different reality TV shows on the internets!

What is your favorite thing to cook and eat right now?
Oh my god I love cooking. My partner is so good at making soft scrambled eggs, and he has recently taught me some of his flair, so my recent fave is soft scrambled eggs with roasted broccoli, parmesan, and shit ton of black pepper. I’m also in a braising phase, so I braise a lot of pork shoulders, briskets, things like this. I am concurrently getting very clear and very serious about my favorite things to go out and eat, because I am very busy and I kind of just want to know that my eat-out food is really good. And this is what I proclaim are the best things to eat out in San Francisco:

• the hunan smoked ham and green beans from Henry’s in Noe Valley – $8
• the karahi paneer rolls at Kasa in the castro – $4.50
• the caesar burger from Super Duper Burger (sounds gross, I know, but it’s so good!) – $5.95
• the thrice cooked bacon and rice dumplings from Mission Chinese. magical. – $12
• the smoked potatoes with ramp mayonnaise from Bar Tartine (fancy!) – $9

LIVE LIFE, CHILDREN! EAT THESE MIRACLES.

What is one thing working with Sara has taught you?
One thing working with Sara has taught me is that my power can be beautiful.

What is/are your day job(s)? Besides actually feeding you, how do(es) it/they feed your life in performance?
I do a lot of things for money. A lot of people have seen me in a few movies, a lot of people have been served various breakfast foods by me, and within the arts, I teach and curate and perform in other people’s work…all beyond my main thrust, which is making my own work. I dont actually know what effect the piecemeal nature of my economic reality is on me and my work. Knowing that would require stepping outside of it, and that’s a privilege I don’t have. I have often thought that my service job keeps me humble, keeps me hungry/angry, keeps me necessarily low to the ground. But lately I’m not so sure. There are a lot of class implications in making the kind of art that I make, and a whole other set of class implications in waiting tables. And it’s hard to know how and when to identify with which, because what I CANNOT manage to do is to be only half there, when I’m at any of these “jobs.” It’s tricky. I don’t know how this story pans out. Or even how I want it to pan out. I think that I am well and lucky. And I think that our economy’s grip on our cultural premiums is a grim grim tragedy. That’s what I think for now.

5 questions from Jennie MaryTai Liu

Jesse Hewit – Photo by Robbie Sweeny, in Peter by Sara Shelon Mann

Sara Shelton Mann: Hybrid 2

November 2–3, 2013

Saturday–Sunday at 8pm
Live Arts Los Angeles
4210 Panamint Street, Los Angeles, CA  90065

San Francisco artist Sara Shelton Mann premieres Hybrid 2 with collaborators Christine Bonansea, Jesse Hewit, Robbie Beahrs, and Mark Growden. Also on the program is tribes/dominion, SNF, and a live music performance by Mark Growden. Hybrid 2 is part of The Eye of Leo Series, a collaborative series of solos created through self-inquiry and conversation. This journey is two solos put together, overlapping. It is a puzzle without a beginning or end. Framed, condensed and constructed through the consciousness of performer and witness, the work functions as both façade and transparency, to look through and listen into. Imagine what they will do next, and what they are thinking. Watch in retrograde. Enjoy.

Discounted tickets available for participants in Sara Shelton Mann’s workshop, The Body Process.

• • •
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sara Shelton Mann – Choreographer, teacher, writer, consultant. Sara trained and performed with Alwin Nikolai and Murray Louis Companies, 1968-72, created a Modern company for Halifax Dance Co-Op 74-79, then moved to San Francisco in 1979 and developed the performance group “Contraband” touring from 1979-96. She collaborated with Guillermo Gomez-Pena 1996-2000. Since 2000 She has taught and created performance work internationally. Her awards include 6 Isadora Duncan Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Gerbode Choreographer in Collaboration Award with David Szlasa, and CHIME, a project of Margaret Jenkins Company. Her training consists of: Movement Alchemy Level I, The Energetic Body, Deep Touch, Writing for Scenario and Advanced Practices.
www.sarasheltonmann.org

Christine Bonansea a multi disciplinary performer artist and choreographer. Graduated in French Dance National Dance school, she studied with Regine Chopinot, Mathilde Monnier and Catherine Diverres among other great artists in Europe. She’s been performing internationally with numbers of companies as Faustin Linyekula, Companie Allias, Sara Shelton Mann, La ALTERNATIVA, Tino Sehgal, Nita Little and more recently Katie Duck.Her recent works has been seen performed at Movement research-New York City, ODC-San Francisco, Dock 11- Berlin and will be seen at the Whenever wherever Festival-Tokyo. She’s been supported by Theater Bay area CASH Grant, the Zellerbach Family foundation and the French Consulate of San Francisco.
www.christinebonansea.com

Jesse Hewit is a dance artist living in San Francisco. His current projects include his own ADULT with Laura Arrington, Turbulence: (a dance about the economy) with Keith Hennessy and Circo Zero, and the Eye of Leo project with Sara Shelton Mann. Recent works have been seen at American Realness in New York, The Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco, PICA’s TBA in Portland, Dock 11 in Berlin, and The Firkin Crane in Cork, Ireland, and recent works have been supported by MAP Fund and residencies from Headlands Center for the Arts and Ponderosa TanzLand. Jesse makes, performs, teaches, and curates around the U.S. and Europe.
www.jessehewit.com

Mark Growden is a singer, writer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, record producer, visual artist, workshop leader, and founder/artistic director of The Calling All Choir. Growden has released several critically acclaimed albums, including Saint Judas, which was awarded “2010 Rekkid of the Year” by music blog Stash Dauber and ranked in the 2010 Village Voice Critics Poll. Growden has toured the US extensively, composed original musical scores for a number of Dance and Theater companies and scored several films. Mark has devoted his life to making music for other people, and to helping other people make music for themselves.
www.markgrowden.org

Robbie Beahrs is an Oakland-based composer, sound artist, and music ethnographer. Since 2005, his fieldwork in Siberia and Mongolia has focused on applied study of nomadic music/sound-making and listening practices. Robbie actively composes chamber music, performs live sound for theater/dance, lectures at U.C. Berkeley, and gives workshops in Tuvan throat-singing and extended vocal techniques. Recent works of his have been performed at the Bang on a Can summer festival, Z Space with Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior, as well as Dock 11 (Berlin), KUNST-STOFF Arts, and the Joe Goode Annex with Sara Shelton Mann.
www.robeahrs.com

Sara Shelton Mann – Workshop: The Body Process

Saturday–Sunday, November 2–3, 2013

2–5pm
Dance Arts Academy, Studio B
731 South La Brea Avenue | Los Angeles, CA 90036

Opening systems of the body from a relaxed space we find the body that is both grounded and expanded into a multi-dimensional reality. The workshop will include chi cultivation and lots of breathing as a platform to both detox and invigorate the whole being. We will address a segment of the body each day through exploration, improvisation, touch and energy work. I bring a toolbox and we play inviting new possibilities. Featuring live accompaniment by Mark Growden.

Presented by Show Box L.A. in conjunction with performances of Hybrid 2 by Sara Shelton Mann at Live Arts Los Angeles, November 2–3, 2013.

• • •
ABOUT SARA SHELTON MANN
Sara Shelton Mann  has been a major influence in the Bay Area scene with her interdisciplinary collaborations – from early work with her group Contraband, performing with Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and through her ongoing investigations of contact improvisation, interdisciplinary teaching and performance methods that work with the person as the vehicle of transformation. Her process has come from personal research and many years of study in various spiritual traditions, shamanic practices, and healing trainings. She is a Master NLP (neuro‐linguistic programming) Practitioner, certified Reconnection Healer(TM), TheReconnection(TM). and a continual student of dowsing and other healing modalities.

For more information visit www.sarasheltonmann.org