Photo credit (L to R): Maryam Rostami by Robbie Sweeney, boychild by Matthew Stone, and Lisa Evans by Sonjai Megette
2017 BRIDGE PROJECT
RADICAL MOVEMENTS:
GENDER AND POLITICS IN PERFORMANCE
November 3-12, 2017
In the beginning, The Bridge Project had a focus on women choreographers. In 2017, with the Radical Movements program, The Bridge Project expanded to focus on gender more broadly. The Radical Movements program challenged the historically exclusionary scope of postmodernism to include artmaking and critical thinking from a range of perspectives. Six different programs brought together leading artists and activists in conversation and performance inspired by the question: What does it mean to have a radical body?
"The Bridge Project is a small ray of hope in a troubled world. Creating spaces for debate, dissent, connection and collaboration, the Bridge Project offers a model for how to build arts community."
--Jack Halberstam (Columbia University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Author of The Queer Art of Failure, Featured Participant in 2017 Bridge Project: Radical Movements)
"For several years Hope Mohr's Bridge Project has connected history and the present moment, art and intellectual probing."
-- "His/Her/Their Moves", Dance Magazine, November 2017
Monique Jenkinson holds Judith Butler's head in their premiere of Ordinary Practices of the Radical Body.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
September 18, 2017
Becca Blackwell
They, Themselves and Schmerm
At Z Below
Friday, November 3, 2017
Judith Butler and Monique Jenkinson premiere Ordinary Practices of the Radical Body
At CounterPulse
Saturday, November 4, 2017
Jack Halberstam and boychild premiere dance of darkness: a performance, a conversation, a rehearsal for the future
At CounterPulse
Friday, November 10, 2017
Lisa Evans in the premiere of How I Got to Femme
At CounterPulse
Friday, November 10, 2017
PRE-SHOW AUDIENCE SALON: What does it mean to have a radical body?
Discussion of audience reader and performances from weekend one. Moderated by Hope Mohr, with special guests TBA.
Saturday, November 11, 2017
Maryam Rostami premieres Untitled 1396
At CounterPulse
Sunday, November 12, 2017
Julie Tolentino's a.u.l.e.
At the Joe Goode Annex
Exploratory performances by Julie Tolentino, Amara Tabor Smith, Larry Arrington, Xandra Ibarra, and Maurya Kerr, developed as part of Tolentino's year-long Community Engagement Residency. Followed by a group discussion with the artists, joined by Tolentino's colleagues, Debra Levine (New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and The Hemispheric Institute for Politics and Performance) and Scot Nakagawa with ChangeLab.
This event was supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency.
Sunday, November 12 (8 PM)
Bridge Project Reception
Lisa Evans in the premiere of How I Got to Femme
Maryam Rostami in the premiere of 1396
PRESS
"Mohr's politics around curation seeks to address imbalances between 'established' and 'emerging' artists ... Her programming continues to ask how to build a 'we' in performance that includes audiences in the conversation."
—Michelle LaVigne and Megan Nicely, “Curating Dialogue: The Bridge Project’s Radical Movements,” TDR: The Drama Review 62:4 (TD40) Winter 2018
"The Bridge Project reimagines and even celebrates conversation as a form that brings us body to body."
-- Maxe Crandall and Selby Schwartz, Critical Correspondence/Movement Research, December 14, 2017
"Ordinary Practices of the Radical Body...will go down in my personal history as the greatest lec-dem of all time. Picture it: two queer icons alone together on the dance floor, step-touching their way through theories of gender, embodied identity, and precarity. Their dancing demonstrated that the philosopher has a body and the dancer has a mind—in other words, everyone is a bodymind—and the toll dancing and scholarly labor takes on the body was made visible by their talk about it." Sima Belmar, Body Nerds, In Dance, January 1, 2018
"The space they occupied transcended the theater stage to become the larger political sphere..."
--Marie Tollon, "A Gender Theorist and a Drag Performer Walk into a Theater", ODC Dance Stories, November 15, 2017
"This year’s festival in particular is meant to unite artists, activists, and academics around the issue of gender equality — inviting performers to explore what it means to have a radical body through their respective mediums. And, with a program that features academics and performance groups, this year’s bridge Project makes that goal a reality. "
-- Eda Yu, "An Academic and a Drag Performer Dialogue Through Dance", KQED Arts, November 9, 2017
"By sparking encounters like th[e] one between the acclaimed San Francisco–based dancer, faux queen and performance maker [Monique Jenkinson] and the world-renowned philosopher, activist and gender theory trailblazer [Judith Butler]....[The Bridge Project] has been a boon to the local arts scene for seven years now." --Rob Avila, 48 Hills
"Hope Mohr is perennially inquisitive. The intellectual curiosity evident in her choreography extends to the intriguing, post-modern dance experiments she orchestrates each year under the imprint of the Bridge Project."
-- Carla Escoda, "Fall Dance Season Will Bring Political Fury to Bay Area Stages", KQED Arts, August 22, 2017
Emily Wilson Interviews Judith Butler, The Right to Be Who You Are, Truthdig, March 21, 2018
"Hope Mohr Dance and Bridge Project create absolutely vital and much-needed discourse for Dance and Performance in the Bay Area and beyond. To have my artistic work included as an integral part of that discourse has been and will continue to be deeply valuable to me." --Monique Jenkinson, featured artist
VIDEO
dance of darkness: a performance, a conversation, a rehearsal for the future, boychild/Jack Halberstam, November 4, 2017
The 2017 Bridge Project was co-produced by CounterPulse, sponsored by the Joe Goode Annex, and supported by the NEA, the California Arts Council Artists Activating Communities grant, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and the Sakana Foundation, and generous individual donors.