Horizon Stanzas

Horizon Stanzas

inspired by Alice Notley's feminist epic poem, "The Descent of Alette”

“Captivating and intellectually rigorous”
—Jen Norris review

Choreography by Hope Mohr

Premiere: Joe Goode Annex, San Francisco

April 27, 29 & 30, 2023

"Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice."
- Louise Glück

Dancer Collaborators: Belinda He, Suzette Sagisi, Tegan Schwab-Alavi

Choreography: Hope Mohr

Text: Alice Notley, from The Descent of Alette

Sound Design: Teddy Hulsker & Hope Mohr  

Lighting Design: Del Medoff

Masks: Ella Noe

Costumes: Tegan Schwab-Alavi

Excerpts from The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley copyright 1992 by Alice Notley. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

This premiere of Horizon Stanzas was made possible through the support of the Zaccho Dance Theatre's Artist in Residency program, Bridge Live Arts, and generous individual donors.

JEN NORRIS REVIEW

INTERVIEW with Rachel Zucker on Commonplace Podcast

About the Artists

Belinda He (dancer) (she/her) Belinda grew up in Singapore, receiving a BA in English Literature before moving to the USA to pursue an MFA in Dance at Sarah Lawrence College. While based in NYC, she was the Artistic Director of SINecdoche Dance, and most frequently worked with Anneke Hansen and Kathy Westwater as performer and rehearsal director. In 2017, she relocated to the Bay Area, where in addition to performing with Hope Mohr Dance, she enjoys a collaborative practice with Karla Quintero, in addition to a shared studio practice with Sara Rudner, Risa Jaroslow and Wendy Rogers. She acknowledges with gratitude influential teachers in her life: Sara Rudner, Barbara Forbes, Janet Panetta, Sara Shelton Mann and Kira Kirsch. Belinda is also a Feldenkrais Practitioner with a specialized interest in working with dancers.

Suzette Sagisi (dancer) (she/her) is a Filipina-American, born and raised in California, who now resides in Berlin. Her commercial dance credits include Beyoncé, Sean Kingston, MTV's “Made,” and “America's Best Dance Crew.” Suzette has trained and danced on hip-hop teams such as Samahang Modern, Static Noyze, and Academy of Villains. During her time in the Bay Area, she has performed with Hope Mohr Dance, Gerald Casel Dance Company, Maurya Kerr’s tinypistol, and Katie Faulkner’s little seismic, among others. 

Her recent dance works include performances with go plastic (Dresden), Sandra Chatterjee (Munich), and Candela Capitan (Berlin), as well as features in Harper’s Bazaar and i-D Germany. “Witch Hunt,” her forthcoming dance film with director Lauren Pringle, is set to release this year. Suzette holds two degrees—a B.A. from UCLA and a M.A. from Tufts—in Philosophy. She is happy and honored to be working with Hope again.

Tegan Schwab-Alavi (dancer and costume artist) (she/her) originally from Miami, Florida, moved to the Bay in 2008 to dance. Over twelve years, she has worked with various artists such as Hope Mohr Dance, Garrett Moulton Productions, Dance Through Time and ODC. 

Tegan took a hiatus from dance to focus on raising her two children. Now after three years, she is excited to come back to dance and the stage, and is thrilled that it will be with her longtime friend and mentor Hope Mohr. Tegan is deeply grateful for her incredible partner, Kian, and her family, for their unwavering support in making her return to dancing a reality.

Hope Mohr (choreographer) (she/her) makes dance that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that just ride underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). Her work has been presented by the San Jose Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space (LA), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Sonoma), Gallery Wendi Norris, Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), SFMOMA, ODC Theater, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown.  

In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance, now known as Bridge Live Arts. In 2020, she co-stewarded the organization’s transition to a model of distributed leadership. In 2023, Hope transitioned out of her Co-Director role and into Affiliated Artist status with Bridge Live Arts to focus on her work as a choreographer.  

Her artist residencies have included Zaccho Dance Theater (2023), 836M Gallery (2022), National Center for Choreography (2019), Petronio Residency Center (2018), Stanford Arts Institute (2016), Bethany Arts Center (2019), ODC Theater (2012-15), Montalvo Arts Center (2010), and the Interdisciplinary Center for Art, Nature and Dance (2005).

Her choreographic awards include an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Outstanding Choreography (2020); a nomination for the Herb Alpert Award (2019); and inclusion in the 2015 YBCA 100, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' annual nationwide list of artists posing important questions about contemporary culture. In 2014, Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron named Mohr as one of the “women leaders” in dance.

Hope teaches contemporary dance technique, creative movement, movement for actors, and cross-disciplinary "embodied mark" practice that puts dance in dialogue with visual art. She has taught at PARTS (Brussels), the Trisha Brown Studio, Stanford University, American Conservatory Theater, Shawl-Anderson, ODC, and the Lines Ballet/Dominican B.F.A. program, among others. hopemohr.org

Alice Notley (poet) has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. Notley earned her BA from Barnard College and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  Active in the New York poetry scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Notley is often identified with the Second Generation New York School poets.  Notley is the author of over 40 books of poetry. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. In 2001, she received both an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. In 2015, she was honored with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. 

In an essay titled “The Poetics of Disobedience,” Notley describes her book-length poem The Descent of Alette (1992) as “an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces.” The narrator, Alette, finds herself on a subway traveling deeper and deeper in the tunnels into an underworld filled with caves and otherworldly characters. The text is visually striking with quotation marks surrounding each poetic foot.