Sara Shelton Mann

Story from Sara Shelton Mann

I was teaching a workshop at ODC in the early 90’s which Kathleen took. I remember her buzz cut and lithe body standing front and center of the group of students, looking at me as to say, “Okay what?” I worked with her solo, in front of the group, and we connected. I could hear her mind saying, “I love dancing and I want all of it in my body, my mind, my spirit. I want the best of what there is.” When I got injured, she danced my solos. When I stopped doing performance vignettes, she took them on. When I quit making art, she came up to me and said, “Hey Sara, would you make a duet for me and Yannis, and then would you make a duet for me and Maria?”

This was at a time that Theater Artaud was empty, and Calvin, David, and I took it over and made two pieces that Kathleen was in. We had an entire theater to make a full evening length work. Pleasure, joy, tough, exploratory, experimental, expansive, scary stuff really, and yet formed. We could have blown up the theater. We just didn’t know it. Extraordinary. This was also a moment in time in SFCA when rents were low, space was available, and people could dive into process and research whole heartedly, as if their lives depended on it. We chose that. Kathleen, Yannis, Maria, David, and Calvin chose that. Everyone I worked with chose that, and still does, if it is possible.

Kathleen was in SF in a time of transition, where she had the choice of the company or the research practice, and I think she chose both. She loved the big idea, the big audience, the big applause. She toured and got that. She developed so many students, and loved teaching so much. She and Albert were a partnership so completely Divine and Parallel in the opposite of things, and yet dove into a symbolic transformative span of somatic soma that drew so many people into places they had not been before. It is difficult to maintain these states of euphoria. It is difficult to maintain a practice in public, that is the public practice. Kathleen had a partner, Albert that was so embedded in her practice, and her in his, that I do not separate them. I celebrate Kathleen and her strength and tenacity and love of her art, and Albert as her muse in the making.

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