Sharon Mansur, Storyteller

SHARON MANSUR, Dance Artist, UMD Assistant Professor, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

This is the moment when I knew I wanted to dance for the rest of my life: My high school boyfriend’s mother, Susan Dowling, was the executive producer for dance programming at public television station WGBH in Boston.

I wanted to … needed to … HAD to experience that intimate and compelling mingling of art and life.

She had been a modern dancer and one weekend we visited a video shoot she was working on for the acclaimed Alive From Off Center series featuring works by independent artists. We saw Mountain View, a dance drama created by choreographer Marta Renzi in collaboration with director John Sayles. In it, over the course of one day together, the characters interacted mostly through movement with little spoken text.

I had always been a mover — ice skating, volleyball, dance.
I had been training in dance since elementary school but in more traditional forms for concert stage. So I was absolutely mesmerized by the relationships these dancers were having in an everyday setting, as real people in real life who happened to express themselves mostly through movement. They were like me!

At that moment I decided that I wanted to … needed to … HAD to experience that intimate and compelling mingling of art and life. And I have been exploring that desire ever since.