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Come and see me dance this weekend with Sharon Mansur.

Sharon Mansur's Borne Identity

By Lisa Traiger



GROWING UP in the 1970s in the small town of Natick, Mass., dancer and choreographer Sharon Mansur never felt comfortable enough, free enough, to definitively declare her ethnicity. "In my family, culturally, a lot was submerged about where my grandparents came from," she mused recently. "Just the simplicity of saying, 'I'm Arab American,' felt like a secret." It's one Mansur, who now lives in Alexandria, has been investigating in the course of creating her newest work, "(Un)Identified," a soul-searching tour de force that is at once enigmatic and provocative in its reflective and revelatory nuances.

Mansur recalls her father's stoic immigrant background. The son of Lebanese Christians who settled in the Northeast, he grew up hiding his Middle Eastern roots, and that mixed message -- to be proud but hidden -- was what Mansur absorbed. In recent years Mansur has lived her identity consciously. "There were a lot of questions that I had about my family," she said, "but I just hadn't gotten to the point where I wanted to ask too much. When I started interviewing my family . . . about Lebanon, I became intrigued with how people remembered the same [life experiences] -- how different the stories were."

"(Un)Identified," onstage at Dance Place this weekend, is part of Mansur's journey, coming to terms with both her Lebanese heritage and her small-town American upbringing. But the work delves as deeply into process as it does personal history; Mansur collaborated with four locally based choreographers in an intriguing multiple partnership that was unusual and complex.

"As a dancemaker, I've been interested in setting up different problems to solve," the petite choreographer explained. "I actually had no idea how this would work . . . but I loved every minute of it." Mansur became the filter and the editor as she invited a quartet of distinctive artists into the studio, each working with her individually on conceptualizing movement, words and feelings.

Naoko Maeshiba of Towson brought her background in butoh -- a highly internalized post-World War II Japanese form -- to Mansur, a dancer trained in the immediacy of improvisation. Boris Willis, a former local choreographer now based at Ohio State University, encouraged her to meld the duality of her identities (her mother is Italian American). Mansur and Silver Spring-based Gesel Mason sought common ground and found much of it, from an aversion to pink to their inherent interest in personal history. Finally, experimental D.C. performance artist Ed Tyler got Mansur thinking about family secrets and how to physically display them, persuading her to literally write them on her body for photographer Ali Herischi to capture. These photos are hung from the stage and figure prominently in the performance.

Mansur said, "I originally asked, 'If you could draw the main essence of my identity in movement, how would you do that?' And I wanted some essence of the others to be infused in my dancing, too."

" '(Un)Identified' grew out of inner and outer perceptions," Mansur said, noting its connection to the program's other works, especially "Off White," which investigates feelings of being other -- not quite white, not quite black. "Being part Middle Eastern and part Italian, I've lived in that middle zone: Am I white or am I not? Sometimes I feel very white and I have a lot of access to being white, but in some situations people see me as not white."

About melding her past and present in performance, Mansur says, "I look at my first-grade class picture and see rows of little blondes and light browns, and there I am with pitch black hair."

SHARON MANSUR -- "(Un)Identified" and other works. Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 4. Dance Place, 3225 Eighth St. NE. 202-269-1600.



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Sharon Mansur's Unassumed Identity

Saturday at Dance Place, choreographer Sharon Mansur questioned her identity, with the turn inward producing as many questions about society as it did answers about Mansur.

With "(Un) Identified," a co-commission with the Kennedy Center, Mansur rises to a new level. She has always made creative movement, but here the choreography develops within a clear thematic structure. Mansur dances, first behind a white strip of paper stretched across the stage, using scissors to cut up pictures of her body, as her feet shuffle through piles of dry leaves. She completes the self-dissection with the help of a paper shredder, then dances before large video projections. The image mirrors the introspective process used to create the work, peering through opaque objects into the world behind them -- at one moment, a hole cut in a door offers a glimpse of a woodsy scene. To make "(Un) Identified," Mansur directed choreographers Naoko Maeshiba, Gesel Mason, Ed Tyler and Boris Willis, with each constructing movement related to their perception of Mansur's identity as a Lebanese and Italian American.

Mansur's style of movement -- silky smooth with tiny, almost mechanistic interruptions -- marks all of her work. In "Presently" and "Off White," dancers skillfully adapt the choreographer's particularities onto their own bodies.

In David Dorfman's "Depth of Perception," Mansur and Willis stream through hops and weight shifts that build into leaps and lifts, stopping to pose provocative questions. "Can I touch you there?" one would ask, pointing to the other's chest or crotch.

The program repeated yesterday.

-- Clare Croft

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