THIS PERFORMANCE TOOK PLACE ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 2023

Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) presented Sara Shelton Mann and Jesse Zaritt in:

within the void/ meet me on the corner
feeling past the edges of my skin/ feeling into the collapse of my systems.
the capacity for 8 directions to implode and reorganize is happening as we speak.
is it night or day in the land of oz/ a sea of souls/ let’s go.

The performance happened on Wednesday, June 21, 2023, 8:00 p.m. in Gallery 308, Landmark Building A. Admission was free with registration for the FMCAC June Art Walk.

The latest collaboration between dance artists Sara Shelton Mann and Jesse Zaritt grew out of Mann’s June 2022 residency at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture and the culminating summer solstice performance of 7 Excavations/at the edge of the shore and the edge of the world. Structured as a duet between Mann and Zaritt, the new work grows out of the pair’s partnered movements from the 7 excavations evening. within the void/ meet me on the corner lives within a sonic world created by Nils Bultmann and Niall Jones. This new solstice performance caps FMCAC’s June Art Walk collaboration among resident organizations FOR-SITE Foundation, Haines Gallery, Museo Italo Americano, SF Camerawork, and SF Children’s Art Center.

Documentation of last summer’s 7 Excavations/at the edge of the shore and the edge of the world performance can be found here: FortMason.org/event/sara-shelton-mann-excavations.

About the Artists

Sara Shelton Mann has created a substantial body of work over a 55-year career as a dancer and choreographer. From 1979 to 1996, she directed the San Francisco-based company Contraband in a series of unique, immersive performances that came to represent a San Francisco Bay Area performance aesthetic.

As a process choreographer, her work is deeply collaborative and interdisciplinary with a focus on weaving stories, experiences, and provocations into improvisational movement scores with a deep commitment to experimenting with new methods and mediums for presenting dance. Like many artists who have spent a lifetime in the heart of their craft, Mann has come to believe that the exploration of dance forms a vital collective heritage that transcends the artifact of performance. Through this colorful heritage of training and dance, Mann seeks to facilitate the emergence of the next generation of Bay Area dance voices.

Mann notes: “My art is of a piece with my healing work and political engagement: it is meant to reveal and transmit the story of our collective humanity — our potential for excellence, our danger — in a time of global change, chaos, and paradigm shift. It is an antidote to fear, doubt, and greed as the face of who we are.”

Jesse Zaritt is a Brooklyn, NY-based dance artist. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, having previously been the inaugural 2014-2016 Research Fellow in the University’s School of Dance. He has also taught at Bard College, Hollins University, Pomona College and for 10 summers at the American Dance Festival. Zaritt has performed his solo work in Taiwan, Uruguay, Russia, Korea, Germany, New York, Japan, Mexico, Israel and throughout the U.S. He has performed with the Shen Wei Dance Arts Company (NYC/2001-2006), the Inbal Pinto Dance Company (Tel Aviv/2008), and in the work of Netta Yerushalmy (NYC/2009-2016) and Faye Driscoll (NYC/2010-2015); he works as an artistic adviser for her current projects. His solo Binding is the recipient of three 2010 New York Innovative Theater Awards: Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Solo Performance, and Outstanding Performance Art Production. Jesse currently works in creative dialogue with Sara Shelton Mann.

Nils Bultmann is a violist, improviser, and composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Active as a performer in the U.S. and Europe, he plays both classical as well as contemporary repertoire. Bultmann’s collaborative projects include dance, video, and avant-garde improvised music. He has generated an expansive body of work in the recording studio, including solo and multi-track viola music as well as collaborative and improvised musical textures. He also writes traditional through-composed works for solo instruments, string quartets, and orchestra.

Bultmann produced two solo recordings of his multi-track compositions, Forgiveness and Terminally Unique on Mutable Music; he was featured as a member of the Transatlantic Art Ensemble performing new works by jazz saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Evan Parker for ECM records. Recently he premiered the solo viola piece “9-9-09” written for him by Roscoe Mitchell and recorded for the Rogue Art label. He was recently awarded the Aaron Copland Recording Grant for the recording and release of his acoustic works on Innova Records, including his series of viola duets with Hank Dutt of the Kronos Quartet. He was commissioned by Michael Tilson-Thomas to compose and perform in a new work for 31 violas (in 8 parts) as part of the 2019 Viola Visions Festival in Miami Beach.

Bultmann completed his PhD in music composition at the University of California–Berkeley, where he worked with David Wessel and Edmund Campion at the Center for New Music and Technology.

Niall Noel Jones is an artist working and living in New York City. Jones constructs, inhabits, and explores the theater as a mode and location of instabilities. Working through an ongoing fascination with labor, temporality, and fantasy, Jones creates immersive, liminal sites for practicing incompleteness and refusal. Jones received a Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer in 2017 and, more recently, a 2021 Grants-To-Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. Recent works include: A Work for Others at The Kitchen OnScreen (2021); Fantasies in Low Fade at The Chocolate Factory, New York (2019); Sis Minor: The Preliminary Studies at Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Germany (2018); Sis Minor, in Fall at Abrons Arts Center, New York (2018); and Splendor #3 at Gibney Dance, New York (2017). Jones received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches at the University of the Arts School of Dance in Philadelphia, where he is also producer and co-curator of The School for Temporary Liveness (Vol. 1 & 2).

Free Admission