With Fanchon and Bonia Shur, it's impossible to tell where the collaborating stops and the personal life begins.

        “We are in love 40 years, legally married 36 and collaborators for 42,” says Mr. Shur, longtime composer for many of his wife's dance works. Their North Avondale home includes a studio, where work begins mere feet and minutes away from breakfast and a phone call to grandkids.

IF YOU GO

What: Growth in Motion presents Flight, Fight, Freeze (reception follows).    When: 3 p.m. next Sunday    Where: Mayerson Hall, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 3101 Clifton Ave., Clifton.    Tickets: $45; 221-3222; tickets growthinmotion.org.

        Their latest work — Flight, Fight, Freeze — moves from workshop to full-length production next Sunday at Hebrew Union College's Mayerson Hall. The dance work has been three years in the making; earliest rehearsals involved only the two of them, improvising and exploring.

        “It was raw energy at the beginning,” says Mrs. Shur. “Not something women ordinarily do in our culture. In one word, it's about rage.”

        The rage that was building in Mrs. Shur came from things general — suppression of women in religion, for one — and personal — something unexplained she was holding inside from her mother's own unresolved rage.

        But most particularly, the suicide of Mr. Shur's son Ophir set her on a path to try to make sense of the anger she was feeling. She went to the place she's most comfortable: in the studio creating movement.

        “I started to explore it kinesthetically,” she says. She found the answer in the way animals move. If they are frightened or experience trauma, which is the impetus for rage, they react physically. Everything in their bodies becomes alert; they fight, they run. If they escape, they shake it off. If they are caught they “play dead.”

        “I had never connected that our instinctual reactions could be healthy,” Mrs. Shur says.

        Together the couple has made a work that takes potential violent expression and turns it into exertion and liberating energy with sounds and voices. “It's not a frill. It's not art for art's sake,” Mrs. Shur says. “It's about core experience.”

        In the climax — to a haunting cello chant with endless variations — the whole piece melts into focused movement.

Longtime Cincinnatians

        The couple has made Cincinnati home since 1974. Mr. Shur is director of liturgical arts at Hebrew Union College; Mrs. Shur is artistic director of Growth in Motion, which offers classes, performances and workshops. Between them, they have six children.

        They defy age categorization. Mr. Shur says it's due to “genetics and good medicine.” Mrs. Shur, 67, has been making dances since she was 13. “Folk dances. I was on a spiritual quest.”

        Mr. Shur, 79, lived on a Kibbutz before moving to the United States in 1960.

        “When I saw him and learned he wrote music, I fixated on this Israeli composer-farmer,” Mrs. Shur says. Married to others at the time, it was two years before they realized their intent to be together.

        On the day of this interview, the discussion was whether to add men to the piece. She pushes for it; he says it's a bad idea.

        “It's about the quality of the piece. There are fights, brutality, powerful moments,” he says. “With men, it'll make it nothing special.”

        Next step is to take Flight, Fight, Freeze into Over-the-Rhine schools.

        “If we come up with the money, we will,” Mrs. Shur says. “Because rage and helplessness and terror — which are the outgrowth of trauma — often run the show in the lives of many of these kids. The whole piece is about how you heal trauma through accepting your feelings — not suppressing them.”

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