Kicking off a season of art at the Moody featuring artistic responses to the climate crisis,score for transitional times is a performance installation and a collaboration between multidisciplinary artists Hope Mohr and Ranu Mukherjee featuring an international ensemble of four dancers: Kayla Collymore, Donna Crump, Suzette Sagisi, and Tegan Schwab-Alavi.
Approaching this era of energy transition from a place of environmental and cultural consciousness, score for transitional times features a scene, or tableau vivant, coalescing and falling apart according to different time signatures.
The dancers repeatedly enact this scene, which draws from lineages of resource extraction, according to visual scores by Mohr and Mukherjee. These visual scores, hybrid forms on muslin that combine drawing and sculpture, hang in the space on moveable screens to become part of the choreography. Working with the intersections of internal, industrial and ancestral time frames, the scores prompt performers to explore layered expressions of tempo and rhythm.
Image credit:
Hope Mohr
Three minutes (sound for ravens) (2024)
Pastel, felt, and acrylic on muslin
69” x 69”
Inspired by Mike Chin’s “Sound for Ravens” as part of “score for transitional times,” a collaboration with Ranu Mukherjee.
"On Agency" uses Judith Butler's “The Psychic Life of Power” as a lens to explore the family as a feminist and queer conundrum of agency, ambivalence, and complicity.
As part of the talk, I'll be showing (and embodying) a series of new works on felt.
Curated by Việt Lê & Presented by CCA's Graduate Visual and Critical Studies
Monday March 4th
5-7 PM
California College of the Arts
Blattner Multipurpose Room
75 Arkansas St.,
San Francisco, CA, 94107
No reservations required; this event is free and open to the public.
Pictured:
Reveal (2024) applique on felt, 3’ x 3’
Partial View, new performance as part of Dancing Distributed Leadership, a project of Bridge Live Arts in collaboration with Rebecca Fitton and Cherie Hill and featuring dancers Belinda He and Rosemary Hannon.
March 22-24, Space 124, San Francisco
Details at https://www.bridgelivearts.org/event-details-registration/experiments-in-motion
Pictured: Rosemary Hannon (up) and Belinda He.
Shifting Culture Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance
by Hope Mohr, with contributions from participants in The Bridge Project
Out now from the National Center for Choreography; Available for order on Amazon.com
"Filled with exquisite insights, Shifting Cultural Power demonstrates what we can do to transform curatorial practices toward our shared destinies. Hope Mohr explores the uneven terrain of dance presenting to take on white privilege and attest to the life-affirming rewards of artivism. Written with a smart, raw, confessional tone, this book includes practical strategies for reshaping the terms of live art presenting. Essential reading, and affirmation that how we move through the world matters, onstage and off."
- Thomas DeFrantz (Director, SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; Founding Director, Collegium for African Diaspora Dance)
Part documentation, part workbook, Shifting Cultural Power offers compelling insight for artist-activist leaders. Mohr reflects on her ten years at the helm of the Bridge Project and the organization's shift into distributed leadership. Originally focused on creating critical exchange within the Bay Area dance community, the Bridge Project evolved to become a home for national discourse around the performing arts and activism. Mohr describes a decade of artist-centered curation, the evolution of the operating context, and her decision to move control of the organization to distributed leadership.
Pictured above: Dancers Karla Quintero, Jane Selna, Suzette Sagisi, and Tara McArthur in “extreme lyric I.” Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Come see the visual artworks resulting from my 6 month residency at Dogpatch Collective! Part of S.F. Open Studios, October 5 & 6, 10-5 PM. 1661 Tennessee Street, #3D, San Francisco, CA. 94107. No reservations required, free and open to the public.