Hope Mohr

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

score for transitional times features a scene 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?

A co-creation with dancers Rosemary Hannon and Belinda He, Partial View is a long-form contact improvisation duet exploring the somatics and performance of partnering.

Partial View invites the audience into co-directing the score alongside the performers to explore the following questions through movement:

What does it mean to direct time?

How do different qualities of touch influence weight sharing?

As a performer, how do you invite an audience into emotional landscape?

What does “theater” mean in the context of contact improvisation?

How do you perform an ongoing process?

Partial View was presented by Bridge Live Arts March 22-24, 2024, as part of Experiments in Motion at Space 124 in San Francisco, in collaboration with choreographer Cherie Hill and Rebecca Fitton.

Creation of Partial View was made possible by residencies at Montalvo Arts Center, Space 124, and Zaccho Dance Theater.

float the mark (2023)

A long form improvised duet in response with Ranu Mukherjee’s dance floor drawing, this is a map of a mine in a forest/this is a drawing/this is a dance floor/this is a question/this is an invitation (2023), Karin pigment markers on marley 20 x 21 feet (detail), part of an exhibit at the Mills Arts Museum. Featuring Jay Carlon and Johnny Nguyen (pictured on Mukherjee’s floor).

Press review of exhibit and performance at Mills Art Museum.

A dance theater project co-directed by Maxe Crandall (playwright) and Hope Mohr (choreographer) inspired by the tragedies of gender reveal parties and Anne Carson's Bakkhai.

Since 2017, this cross-disciplinary collaboration between Hope and painter Ranu Mukherjee has included gallery activations, embodied storytelling workshops for immigrant and refugee artists, and museum performances.

inspired by Alice Notley’s feminist epic, “The Descent of Alette”

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.

The 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

Inspired by Ben Lerner’s acclaimed novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, this new work of experimental dance theater premiered in the Bay Area January 24-27, 2019 at Southern Exposure and in L.A. at Highways Performance Space February 1 & 2.