score for transitional times (2025)

January 6-10, 2025
Moody Center for the Arts, Houston

Kicking off a season of art at the Moody Center for the Arts 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. 

score for transitional times asks: 

How can the wisdom of the body  inform dialogue around sustainable futures?
How can we connect to multi-dimensional senses of time through somatic practice?
What is the relationship between our personal sources of energy and the infrastructures that sustain our way of life?
How can an artwork explore the invisible and dynamic play between our life force and forces  under the ground?

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.