L/are we dreaming

The Magician

Are you moving solo, neutral – or are you following someone else? And are you even in your body?
The evening begins with a clearly articulated score: “Solo – Neutral – Follow.” You decide where you are – in your body, in the space, in relation to others. Where does my own impulse begin? Why do I pause? And when do I allow myself be guided?

„Whose body are you in? Sure about that?“

These questions arise anew with every step, with every gesture. Because what happens between bodies is not empty space, – it’s charged with energy, an invisible web of proximity, resistance, withdrawal, and response.
Sara Shelton Mann speaks of being able to see the “glue” between people – those subtle negotiations that become visible as strange collisions, even though it’s energy that surrounds the body. And yet, the bodies bump into each other or take positions. But why?
For the opening of the evening, Sara Shelton Mann invited dancers Christine Salut Bonansea and Rita Vilhena to explore this score through improvisation. Music flickers across the room, overlaid with a polyphony of chattering voices that weave, amplify, and cancel each other. Meanwhile, the two dancers move continuously – swaying, floating, flowing – in a state of constant transformation. The sense of instability and groundlessness is intensified by shifting light zones that momentarily create spaces, only to dissolve them again.
The piece begins like a stream – a rush of language, an urge to communicate, an overflow of signs. And yet, everything remains porous, open, fragmented.

The score is more than a choreographic structure; it’s a living coordinate system in which presence, relation, and self-perception are continually renegotiated. Am I action or reaction? Impulse or echo? Maybe all at once?
“Solo – Neutral – Follow” is not a fixed instruction, but a mutable state. In fact, not even a state – more a continual reconfiguration. The performers move fluidly through these modes – transparent, permeable, constantly shifting. Each moment is a decision – and always a letting go of what one is not. A movement can trigger resonance – or deliberately lead into emptiness. Nothing is asserted, everything remains fragile, open, tentative.

„Repeat this path again as quicksilver, like Alice sliding down the rabbit hole."

Sara Shelton Mann and Jesse Zaritt met ten years ago in Utah – and have been collaborating ever since. L/are we dreaming continues this long-standing artistic dialogue – an intense encounter unfolding through dance, sound, language, and drawing.

Shelton Mann sits at her laptop and presses play. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, op. 37 begins – unexpectedly monumental, at times passionate, at times tender. Jesse Zaritt begins to spin, to swirl, crashes into walls, pauses, collapses into himself. He clings to the wall, recalibrates, sinks into a squat, and freezes – just as the orchestra swells, the strings surge, and the piano takes flight. Then: an abrupt stop. The music cuts off, only to resume seconds later – seemingly at random. Shelton Mann controls this stop-and-go casually – while Zaritt dances, dances, dances, undisturbed, as if time and music never broke.
This tension is echoed in the lighting design, which reacts improvisationally to sound and movement. Light shifts between blinding white, dusky twilight, sudden blackness. Spaces emerge only to vanish again. Here too: no ground, no safety, no fixed frame.
Their presence doesn’t represent something – it is something: vulnerable, searching, receptive to friction. The body is not simply material but a sensitive medium – not a vessel for meaning, but the event itself. What does the body remember? How does space speak through gesture, through voice, through breath? Shelton Mann and Zaritt meet each other with a radical attentiveness. They circle, they listen, they repel, they don’t always answer.

„Play with the rhythm, foreground, and background of your creation while traversing the path.“

Nothing remains constant, yet everything remains conscious. The piece moves through in-betweens – crossing, shifting, dissolving. Rhythm, foreground and background shift, overlap, dissolve. In this interplay between structure and dissolution, a space continually reshapes itself – a quiet attempt to remain awake within the dream.
At 81, Sara Shelton Mann moves through this space with the clarity of a magician. She clings to nothing, yet holds everything together: the evening, the bodies, the fractures, the tremors – and the audience, too. Her words ripple through the performance like interruptions in the current: references to war, American politics, the weight of the world. Her voice doesn’t narrate; it marks something – a quiet act of resistance.

The time of my death has come.

A sentence that lingers. Not as a conclusion, but as a suspension. Is it the end of a form, a gesture, a time? Or simply another passage?
Perhaps this is the real strength of the evening: that it refuses to declare or explain. Instead, it invites us to stay in motion – between states, between bodies, between meanings. Between what we think we know and what remains uncertain.
As the stage slowly darkens, something stays behind. As if time had briefly lifted, allowing us to step back in differently.

What are you dreaming?

Berlin, 09/07/2025

All quotes are from Sara Shelton Mann's book „Moving Alchemy“, 2025, p. 88 f.