Under the direction of Charles O. Anderson and Andrea Beckham, Transcendence is a celebration of the illustrious career of Dr. Yacov Sharir. The founder of the American Deaf Dance Company and Sharir Dance Company, Dr. Sharir’s research and choreography features virtual environments and computerized movement.
Look up! When you enter the lobby of the B. Iden Payne Theatre, the dance has already begun: the ghostly forms of dancers leap and twirl and embrace across translucent fabric; caught between the past and present, the archive and the repertoire.
Through a revival of his duet More About Love and interlude and lobby projections abstracted from archival footage of his choreography, Transcendence will celebrate the illustrious career of Dr. Yacov Sharir. A member of the Department of Theatre and Dance’s dance faculty since 1978, Dr. Sharir has inspired and guided generations of dancers, choreographers and designers in Austin. His choreography – imaginative, urgent, cerebral, athletic, humorous, unbridled, joyously physical, daringly virtual – has influenced contemporary dance throughout the world.
Since his earliest forays in choreography, Dr. Sharir’s work has been characterized by restless, pioneering innovation and a trans-disciplinary drive to expand what dance is and can be. By teaching in the Department of Theatre and Dance, he constructs a bridge between current undergraduates and artistic legends of the twentieth century. Born in Morocco and raised in Israel, Dr. Sharir began his career as a visual artist, training at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in sculpture and ceramics under the co-inventor of Dada, Marcel Janco. He danced with Batsheva Dance Company, the Stuttgart Ballet and the Ballet Theatre Contemporaine in Paris under the direction of such outstanding choreographers as Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins and José Limon.
Dr. Sharir founded the nation’s first professional Deaf dance company in 1977, traveling the nation to recruit Deaf dancers. American Deaf Dance Company produced their first performance after the company — all new to professional dancing — had trained for only two weeks. The company participated in Spectrum, an arts colony focusing on deaf artists founded in Austin, and toured throughout the nation. The Sharir and Sharir/Bustamante Dance Collection has preserved pieces of this important cultural history here.
In 1982, Dr. Sharir founded Sharir Dance Company, The University of Texas at Austin’s professional company-in-residence through its final season in 2007. The company took the name Sharir + Bustamante Danceworks in 1997, acknowledging José Luis Bustamante as co-director. Sharir Dance Company became the leading contemporary dance company in Texas, earning an international reputation through its tours to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Highlights of Dr. Sharir’s earlier choreography, hosted in the Dance Collection, and described by Austin dance critic and choreographer Sondra Lomax, include More About Love (1988), The Egg (1992), Margo’s World (1993) and Cart With Apples #2 (1999).
Sharir Dance Company transformed Austin’s conception of dance by hosting artists of international stature whose work, centered around cultural centers like New York City, had been previously inaccessible to Texas audiences. The company’s partnerships benefited UT students enormously. Students enjoyed opportunities to study and train with remarkable artists and companies, from local stars Deborah Hay, Sally Jacques, Andrea Ariel, Ellen Bartel and Allison Orr; to national luminaries Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Trisha Brown, Margaret Jenkins and Bella Lewitzky; to international celebrities Rina Schenfeld, Ohad Naharin and Eiko & Koma.
In 1989, the Sharir Dance Company focused the attention of the dance world on Austin by initiating a long-term collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which resulted in the world premieres of three co-commissioned new Cunningham works: “Cargo X” (1989), “Change of Address” (1992) and “Tune in/Spin out” (1996).
Beginning in the late 1980s, Dr. Sharir wondered what dance could be in the absence of physical limitations, and began experiments in the intersection of live performance and virtual reality. He earned the accolade “the cyberking of modern dance” with his controversial applications of cutting-edge technology, collaborating with engineers, programmers and computer animation artists.
Throughout this style of work, Dr. Sharir never replaced the live performer with the machine. Rather, he expanded the dimensions of performance with wearable computers that reacted to dancers’ movements, heart rates and neural signals, projecting them as image and color; immersive 3-D environments and virtual cyborg dance partners. Examples of this work include Virtual Bodies: Travels Within (1994), I Have No Face Act I and II (2002), 3D [Embodied] (2013) and AdMortuos (2015).
Dr. Sharir’s choreographic experimentation continues, buoyed by technological advancements that have caught up with his imagination: the recent work Ad Mortuos provides spectators with a satisfying full-circle experience of Sharir’s career, as performed by students of Dance Repertory Theatre (Texas Theatre and Dance), interpret a poem through the gestural language of American Sign Language and dance through an immersive environment alongside media projections that respond to their movements.
Documenting and preserving dance has always been difficult. Dr. Sharir’s work is perhaps particularly suited to a digital life because he is a pioneer of the integration of digital media and live performance. The Sharir and Sharir/Bustamante Dance Collection hosted at the Fine Arts Library and Texas ScholarWorks preserves a digital and physical archive of Dr. Sharir’s work and legacy. Visit the collection to explore videos, photographs and other documents of American Deaf Dance Company, Sharir Dance Company/Sharir+Bustamante Danceworks and their many collaborators.
In addition to the celebration of the distinguished career of Dr. Yacov Sharir, Transcendence is also the inaugural year of the Haruka Weiser Commission, which supports the creation and performance of a new work in celebration of the life and art of Haruka Weiser.
Written by Katie Van Winkle, Sharir and Sharir/Bustamante Dance Collection Archivist; Harrington Doctoral Fellow and Ph.D. in Performance as Public Practice candidate at The University of Texas at Austin.
Transcendence
Artistic Directors Charles O. Anderson and Andrea Beckham
March 28-April 8, 2018
B. Iden Payne Theatre
Photos: Sharir/Sharir+Bustamante Collection, photo by Jonathan Leatherwood; “Blurred Boundaries” choreographed by Andrea Backham and Yacov Sharir, photo by Brenda O’Brien (Physical Language, Texas Theatre and Dance, 2011); “AdMortuos” choreographed by Yacov Sharir, photo by Lawrence Peart (MOVE!, Texas Theatre and Dance, 2015).
