2018 COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT RESIDENCY:
Gerald Casel, Dancing Around Race
HMD's Bridge Project is proud to support choreographer Gerald Casel for a full year as Lead Artist in Dancing Around Race, the 2018 Community Engagement Residency. Description of Dancing Around Race by Casel:
My choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. For this residency, I will be engaging with artists as co-interrogators to look closely at the role race plays in dance production and presentation. We will ask how our work as artists functions in society and how the communities we engage with are considered, internalized, and reflected through our work. Employing a 'systems thinking' approach, I hope to connect with sectors of the Bay Area dance ecology and beyond to engage in invigorated dialogue to better understand how all are interconnected. We will invite curators, critics, scholars, dance writers, grantors, collaborators, publicists, and audience members to come together to spark conversations around dance. We will address systems of support, power and privilege, race and colorblind racial ideology, issues and problems around diversity, resilience and sustainability, and more. Working with the premise that all sectors are interdependent, we will promote a culture of empathy so that every part of the dance community feels more visible, heard, and understood. Finally, we will identify issues that dancers, choreographers and their collaborators face and will try to create solutions to problems that may be attributed to misunderstandings, uninformed assumptions, and myths.
As part of Casel's residency, HMD will present two Community Engagements Forums that invite the public into this process.
Members of the artist cohort for Dancing Around Race are: Raissa Simpson, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sammay Dizon, Yayoi Kambara and David Herrera.
Funding for the 2018 CER comes in part from the Center for Cultural Innovation's "Investing in Tomorrow" grant.
Photo of Gerald Casel by Robbie Sweeney.
On Wednesday May 23rd at 6 PM at the S.F. Conservatory of Dance, Hope Mohr will have a studio showing of work in progress from extreme lyric I, which will premiere in October 2018. Reservations required. RSVP to hopemohr@gmail.com.
Photo by Margo Moritz. Design/Concept by Aza Raskin.
The Bridge Project and CIIS co-present
A Contact Improvisation Workshop with Kristin Horrigan:
(Un)Doing Gender in CI
Friday and Saturday
June 2 & 3, 2018
12-5 PM
Free Public Talk June 1 at CIIS.
Location: S.F. Conservatory of Dance, 301 8th Street, San Francisco
Sliding Scale $125-$200
To register email: programs@hopemohr.org
Workshop Description
Contact Improvisation is about responding in the moment, playing with the possibilities, creating with what we find, and using our full physical capacity to navigate the situations that present themselves. Within this form, we have tremendous freedom to move our bodies and to discover different dynamics of dances. But, what if we are holding ourselves back from the full range of possibilities in our dancing, in ways we do not even realize? Gendered patterns of movement and interaction play a larger role in CI dancing than one might think, given that CI is a form without any proscribed gender roles. In our days together, we will seek to deepen our CI dancing, strengthen our technique, and expand the range of dances we have by discovering how gender lives in our movement and building strategies to undo the ways it limits us.
Kristin Horrigan is a contact improviser, Professor of Dance and Gender Studies at Marlboro College in Vermont, and the former Artistic Director of the intergenerational company Dance Generators. She has been dancing contact improvisation for 20 years, teaching regularly in the US and abroad. Begun as an exploration of the queer potential of CI as a gender-fluid dance, her current research is a practice of unearthing the habits and histories that limit us to gendered stories. In addition, Kristin’s CI teaching explores pedagogy that preserves the accessibility of CI for people of all body types and abilities, the skill of being interested in the moment, and relationships between play and composition. At Marlboro College, Kristin directs a curriculum that is oriented towards social justice, creative process, critical thinking, and interdisciplinarity. Kristin holds an MFA in Choreography from Ohio State University and works as a community-based artist, drawing together untrained and trained dancers to collaborate around issues of mutual concern.
To register email programs@hopemohr.org
Composition Intensive with Hope Mohr
Wed June 6-Sunday June 10
An intimate retreat in the remote woods of Mendocino County.
In this retreat, we will break down movement to get at strangeness and to excavate a voice closer to the bone. How can we listen to how movement maps onto time? How can we edit our dances so they jolt the senses? How can we translate core creative questions into abstract form? Participants will enjoy deep inquiry through making, unmaking, focused research, improvisation, reading, writing, and discussion. Part of the work will include writing about the work.
LIMITED TO 6 PEOPLE.
Participants can camp in tents or sleep indoors.
Workshop fee includes room and board for 4 days and 4 nights.
All food preferences accommodated. Open kitchen available. Participants are welcome to bring their own food to supplement meals.
Workshop Fee: Sliding scale $400-$500
To apply, send statement of intent to hopemohr@gmail.com
HMD will be showing excerpts from a new dance theater adaptation of Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, as part of the FURY Factory Festival in San Francisco July 19 & 22, 2018, 8:30 PM.
In Lerner's postmodern novel about an artist's search for authenticity, the protagonist poet, crippled by irony and doubt, longs to disappear into numbness. But he secretly believes in the power of art. Beyond merely staging the novel, Mohr's adaptation takes the genre-breaking nature of Lerner's auto-fiction as a jumping off point for hybrid theater: part dance improvisation, part monologue, part hallucinatory testimonial for the role of art in precarious times. Featuring two veteran performers, Christian Burns and Wiley Naman Strasser, each of whom embodies a different aspect of the protagonist's conflicted self.
The full work premieres at Southern Exposure in January 2019.
Pictured here: Wiley Naman Strasser and Christian Burns in rehearsal.
Hope Mohr is thrilled to be continuing her collaboration with visual artist Ranu Mukherjee through Mukherjee's commission for Be Not Still, Living in Uncertain Times at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, June 13 - November 1, 2018. Performance will be on October 13, 2018.
Photo of HMD dancers Jane Selna and Suzette Sagisi in the burned and recovering landscape of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art.
Photo by Ranu Mukherjee.
OCTOBER 4-6, 2018
Co-produced by ODC Theater
For HMD's 11th home season, Artistic Director Mohr will premiere a new work inspired by and featuring Anne Carson's translations of Sappho. The new work has an all-female cast and will be performed in the round. As with others on the margins of history, Sappho’s story is not ready-made. extreme lyric I will explore the nature of the fragment through premature endings, gaps inside movement and partial visibility. extreme lyric I will ask: How do we cope with faulty archives? If we speak before we identify the "I", what movement in the body and in the body politic is possible?
The work features featuring an all-star team of dancers and collaborators, including playwright Mia Chung, sound designer Theodore Hulsker, visual designer Joan Osato, set designer Tanya Orellana, and costume designer Tiffany Amundson.
The Bridge Project Teaching Artist Series presents
A Workshop with Heather Kravas
November 3-4, 2018
TO REGISTER EMAIL programs@hopemohr.org
Labor, Structure, Desire
A conversation between language, movement and each other, this class invites dance makers, performers and individuals to explore the emotional and dynamic edges of rigorous physical states. How may our dancing be simultaneously political and abstract? Formal and spontaneous? Precise and kinky? Deriving inspiration from a variety of teachers and sources, we will use improvisation, repetitive movement and task-oriented structures to create dances that value immediacy, depth and complexity.
About Heather Kravas
Heather Kravas is a choreographer and performing artist. Since 1995, she has investigated choreographic, improvisation and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the limits of choreography as a form and her abilities as an artist. Combining recognizable traditions, tasks and somatic practices her dances grapple with structural idealism and uncontainable emotions. In a renunciation of the spectacular, she strives to illuminate actions such as labor, listening, concentration, failure and presence.
Kravas grew up in Pullman, Washington, where, under the tutelage of Deirdre Wilson, she studied classical ballet and the experimental theater theories of Jerzy Grotowski. Significant to her understanding of dance as a relevant and complex form are the many artists/teachers/colleagues she has been privileged to work with/for: Antonija Livingstone, DD Dorvillier, Dayna Hanson, Stephanie Skura, Marina Abramavic, Okkyung Lee, Yvonne Meier among many.
Ms. Kravas has received support from Creative Capial, the Doris Duke Impact Award, Foundation for Contemporary Art, MAP Fund, National Performance Network, Seattle Arts Commission, 4 Culture, f.u.s.e.d, Bossack-Heilbron Foundation, the Yard and Pact-Zollverein. Her choreography has been presented at venues including American Realness, Base, Chez Bushwick, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project @ St.Markʼs Church, Fusebox Festival, The Kitchen, Movement Research @ Judson Church, On the Boards, Performance Space 122, Tonic and Velocity Dance Center as well as internationally.
Heather currently lives in Seattle, Washington with her family.
Photo by Jason Starkie.
On Friday April 27 at 2 PM at S.F. Conservatory of Dance, HMD will host an open rehearsal for Mohr's newest work, extreme lyric I, as part of Bay Area Dance Week. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations required. RSVP to hopemohr@gmail.com.
Photo by Margo Moritz. Design/Concept by Aza Raskin.