Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/08/2017
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location
California Institute of Integral Studies
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Drawing on our university’s mission of personal and social transformation, CIIS Public Programs released a call for bay area performers of all types interested in presenting new and existing work in response to the concept of Performance as Resistance. This event features two of the selected performers who applied to the call earlier this year.
In times of protest, the works artists create are often a reflection of, and contribution to, resistance efforts. This evening explores the intersection of performing arts and resistance with two short dance pieces, followed by conversations with their creators about their process, the meaning behind the movements, and more.
Hope Mohr Dance presents an excerpt from Precarious, a dance inspired by the passing of the last industrial blacksmith shop in San Francisco. The performance was created by Hope Mohr as a protest against San Francisco’s gentrification boom as a threat to the city’s identity as a progressive, inclusive place accessible to a wide variety of artists and artisans.
Heather Stockton presents a new dance work investigating how the body is weathered by the deluge of “emergency” and “breaking development” news stories, and the resulting questions about resistance. In this piece, she responds to the question: How is a body most effective at performing resistance in this time?
Hope Mohr is a curator, choreographer, and writer. She trained at SF Ballet School, studied theater at Yale, and earned her BA at Stanford, where she wrote her honors thesis on the women’s movement in Nicaragua. After working as an Americorps Team Leader in South Central LA, Hope moved to NYC to train on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown.
Passionate about pursuing both community organizing and dance, Hope earned a JD from Columbia Law School, where she was a Columbia Human Rights Fellow. In 2007, she returned to San Francisco to establish Hope Mohr Dance to create, present, and foster outstanding art at the intersection of critical thinking and the body. HMD’s signature curatorial platform the Bridge Project approaches curating as community organizing to convene cultural conversations that cross discipline, geography, and perspective.
Hope has held residencies at Stanford Arts Institute, ODC Theater, Montalvo Arts Center, and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance. She is a 2016 Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Heather Stockton is the Artistic Director and founder of the local dance collective, Wax Poets, where she oscillates between roles as director, choreographer, and performer. Heather’s choreography has been presented in the Bay Area at Joe Goode Annex, Noh Space, The Garage, Littlefield Concert Hall, Temescal Arts Center, and Lisser Theater. Outside of the Bay Area, her work has been presented in Seattle at On the Boards Theater and Velocity Dance Center as well as at Harvard University and Landis Performing Arts Center. She has contributed pieces to the dance films Everything You’re Feeling is Okay, UnderCutThumb&Throat, Self Broadcasting, Blustery, and For a Time Feeler. In addition to dance films, her video work has been featured online by Slate and Jezebel.
Originally from Riverside, CA, Heather has had the honor of dancing in works by Amy O’Neal/Tiny Rage, Katie Faulkner, Sheldon Smith, Shinichi Iova-Koga, Merce Cunningham (staged by Holley Farmer), Laara Garcia (Psuedopod Interactive), and Wade Madsen. Heather received her BFA and MFA (pr) at Mills College and was awarded the EL Wiengand Foundation Award for outstanding merit in performance and choreography. Heather is a Teaching Artist with Luna Dance Institute where she is an advocate for equity and creative learning through arts education.