Hope Mohr Dance Sets Spring, Fall 2015 Seasons

Hope Mohr Dance has announced the program for its 2015 spring and fall seasons, featuring three world premieres including a collaboration with choreographer Christian Burns, and works by visiting artists Deborah Hay andJeanine Durning. Hope Mohr's spring season is co-presented by ODC Theater, Thursday - Sunday, May 28 - 31. Mohr's annual Bridge Project in the fall is co-presented by CounterPulse, Friday - Sunday, November 6 - 8.

Two new dances comprise Hope Mohr Dance's spring season. On the first half of the program isStay, a work for five dancers, which takes the emotionally raw paintings of Francis Bacon as its point of departure. "In Stay I'm not working to recreate Bacon's compositions," explains Mohr, "but instead the feelings I have in response to his paintings: viscerally affected, morally challenged. Bacon's hallucinatory images have pushed me to 'stay' longer with certain difficult ideas, opening the door to emotional content underneath formal concerns."

In Stay those formal concerns include a commitment -- one shared with Bacon -- to non-narrative representation. More pressingly for Mohr, the piece explores the relationship between abstraction and the emotions in an effort to find a way out of the alienation so endemic to Bacon's work. "I want to show, that in the context of abstract art there can be emotional connection -- among dancers, and between performers and audience."

Performers in Stay include Patrick Barnes, Lindsey Renee Derry, Michael Galloway, James Graham and Tegan Schwab. Sound design for Stay is by Teddy Hulsker, with set, lighting and live video projection design by Mohr's longtime collaborator, David Szlasa.

The second half of Mohr's spring season is devoted to a choreographic collaboration between Mohr and Burns, a world premiere titled The Material of Attention. Mohr and Burns have spent the last two years developing a shared improvisation practice that brings together their different dance lineages. Mohr performed with postmodern pioneers Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Margaret Jenkins; Burns performed with pioneers in contemporary ballet Alonzo King and William Forsythe.

The Material of Attention expands their improvisation research to include an ensemble of six dancers: Aidan DeYoung, James Graham, Parker Murphy, Peiling Kao, Tegan Schwab and Megan Wright. "The work develops our practice of performing instantaneous composition based on principles of awareness," says Mohr. "We're exploring the middle ground between chaos and order, craft and surprise."

This fall marks Mohr's sixth annual Bridge Project, her company's signature curatorial platform that annually recruits the prime movers of American postmodernism to the Bay Area to teach and perform. By honoring the past and giving context to the present, the Bridge Project fills a critical gap in the artistic and intellectual life of the Bay Area. This year's event, which takes place at CounterPulse's new home at 80 Turk Street in the Tenderloin, will showcase the work of Deborah Hay, Jeanine Durning, Mohr as well as several other Bay Area dance artists.

The joint program, titled Rewriting Dance, explores the intersection of language and movement, with performances of Hay's Reorganizing Ourselves, Durning's inging, and Manifesting, a new work by Mohr. The evening promises to offer a stimulating conversation between Hay, a pioneer in experimental, question-based choreography, and Durning and Mohr, both of whose work delves into the links between the body and the brain. Notably, Durning and Hay are longtime collaborators.

Hope Mohr Dance's spring season runs Thursday through Saturday, May 28 - 30, at 8pm, and at 2pm on Sunday, May 31. Tickets range between $20 to $45 on a sliding scale, and may be purchased online at odcdance.org/buytickets.php or by calling 415-863-9834, Monday through Friday from 12 - 3pm. Additional details about Hope Mohr Dance's Bridge Project, including ticket reservations, will become available in early summer. For more information, visit hopemohr.org.

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