Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance

Note on Engaging with this Book

This book offers a range of formats. The case studies may be read in sequence or on their own and out of order. For those interested in a behind-the-scenes underview of the who and how of the past ten years of The Bridge Project, please refer to the Annotated Archive that begins on page 100. For dancers, students, teachers, and choreographers interested in prompts for studio practice, please refer to the workbook section, Grounding Politics in the Body: Prompts for Studio Practice, beginning on page 89. Readers and movers can engage with these prompts for embodied practice in conjunction with the book’s case studies or as a line of movement research independent of the rest of the book.

This book is dedicated to the artists and thinkers who participated in and contributed to The Bridge Project 2010–2020 on stage and behind the scenes and to those who carry this work forward.

Affinity Project, Larry Arrington, Hannah Ayasse, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Byb Chanel Bibene, QTBIPOC Performing Artist Hive,¹ Becca Blackwell, Corey Brady, Marc Brew, Jennifer Brody, Trisha Brown, Barbara Bryan, Rebecca Bryant, Sarah Cecilia Bukowski, Judith Butler, Christy Bolingbroke, boychild, Nigel Campbell, Gerald Casel, Sherwood Chen, Sarah Chenoweth, Lucinda Childs, Tristan Ching, Sandra Chinn, Maxe Crandall, Chibueze Crouch, Sofía Córdova, Jaime Cortez, Gregory Dawson, Thomas DeFrantz, Sammay Dizon, Zoe Donnellycolt, Yalini Dream, Aruna D’Souza, Jeanine Durning, Laura Ellis, Alex Escalante, Jesse Escalante, Lisa Evans, Katie Faulkner, Molissa Fenley, Traci Finch, Aura Fischbeck, Dudley Flores, Amy Foote, Simone Forti, Christy Funsch, Marlene Garcia, Daria Garina, Liz Gerring, Tracy Taylor Grubbs, Miguel Gutierrez, Jack Halberstam, Anna Halprin, Rosemary Hannon, Emily Hansel, Deborah Hay, David Herrera, Leslie Heydon, Cherie Hill, Kristin Horrigan, Xandra Ibarra, Monique Jenkinson, Tammy Johnson, Safi Jiroh, Yayoi Kambara, Deborah Karp, Peiling Kao, Debby Kajiyama, Maurya Kerr, David Kishik, Richard Kim, Nicole Klaymoon, Heather Kravas, Jos Lavery, Claudia La Rocco, Cheryl Leonard, Liz Lerman, Diane Madden, Nicole Maimon, Joanna Mandel, Sara Shelton Mann, Amy Miller, Janice Mirikitani, Paloma McGregor, Rashaun Mitchell, Julie Moon, Maurice Moore, Ranu Mukherjee, Parker Murphy, Jose Navarrete, Megan Nicely, Michael Orange, Phoenicia Pettyjohn, Susan Rethorst, Estrellx Supernova, Frances Richard, Silas Riener, Stephanie Skura, Alva Noë, Michael Orange, Onye Ozuzu, Chrysa Parkinson, Jocelyn Reyes, Maryam Rostami, Aisha Shillingford, Michèle Steinwald, Bhumi B. Patel, Jenny Odell, Nicole Peisl, Jarrel Phillips, Karla Quintero, Yvonne Rainer, Danishta Rivero, Janice Ross, Judith Sánchez Ruíz, Aisha Shillingford, Raissa Simpson, Suzette Sagisi, Dazaun Soleyn, Amara Tabor-Smith, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, Jenny Stulberg, Lauren Simpson, Nadhi Thekkek, Julie Tolentino, Beatrice Thomas, Snowflake Towers, Dušan Týnek, Edgar Villanueva, Sophia Wang, sam wentz, Maureen Whiting, Taja Will, Tyese Wortham, Megan Wright, Netta Yerushalmy, Stacey Yuen.

Note from NCCAkron

Christy Bolingbroke, Executive/Artistic Director at the National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron

It is not what we do, but how and why we do it.

In 2016, I accepted what would be a liberating invitation to helm the second choreographic center of its kind in the country. Established a year earlier, the National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron (NCCAkron) was founded to support the research and development of new work in dance by: strengthening the national dance ecosystem as an anchor development space for dance; exploring the full potential of the creative process in dance and all its forms; and serving as a catalyst for artistic, cultural, and community advancement and enrichment.

Continuing to acknowledge the tremendous privilege this position affords me to focus on process over product, I also saw this as an opportunity to be a type of organization unto itself. Neither an artist, funder, nor presenter, we may be perceived as any of these ecological players depending on the context and audience. Operating from what I often describe as the cracks in the dance ecosystem, we are more nimble than most organizations. I feel we have a higher threshold for uncertainty, experimentation, and embracing failure. We can improvise as we constantly seek to improve.

Also in 2016, I was fortunate to hear Black postmodern choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones reflect on his curation for Lost & Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now with Danspace Project’s artist-curated Platforms. Houston-Jones spoke of curating from a place of absence. Others may define curation as the selection of artists, but Houston-Jones’ comments have stuck with me as a charge to read the landscape and ask, who is missing?

Upon arrival in Akron, I found the region has a deep history with dance because of a longtime relationship with white male choreographer Heinz Poll and the now defunct Ohio Ballet. In the 1980s and 90s, Poll was a visionary commissioner for the times, inviting in modern dance choreographers to make work for his chamber ballet company. From my vantage point, when Heinz Poll and Ohio Ballet passed on in the early 21st century, the aesthetic conversation around dance somewhat faltered in the city. So my curatorial approach has been to respond to what is missing; to expand the definition of dance through who we invite into Akron for residencies and labs.

This remains a consistent practice when collaborating and working with the dance program at The University of Akron too. NCCAkron moved into what would have been Ohio Ballet spaces on The University of Akron’s campus. This location means we have access to various university facilities and resources despite not being part of the university system. Because of NCCAkron’s proximity to higher education and the professionalized dance field, I acutely feel the need to evolve dance curriculum on a foundational level. Most dance programs across the county were formed by white men and women (mostly women) before the civil rights movement. As such, the damaging technique binary of ballet/modern continues to be perpetuated because of its own roots in systems of white supremacy. So I have worked to use what NCCAkron can bring to augment the dance program offerings for today’s students as well as to locate dance in conversations across campus to tap those faculty and expand who might find dance relevant.

Reorganizing Ourselves, an event with choreographer Deborah Hay, philosopher Alva Noë, and curator Michèle Steinwald, is another artistic experience that shapes my curatorial thinking and operations. Reorganizing Ourselves was presented in 2015 in San Francisco as part of The Bridge Project, a platform originated, and that year curated by, choreographer Hope Mohr. During the event, Hay proposed that we should ask different questions rather than seek out the same answers. Noë offered that the Socratic method was not intended to be a new conversation style, but rather a way of using questions to disrupt conversational habits. He proposed that perhaps choreography is not just a means to make dances, but rather a way of disrupting dance-making habits. The seventy-plus people in attendance then physically reorganized ourselves from theater-style seating into one large circle, and Steinwald invited everyone to offer a question. Round and round we went for almost an hour. No answers were offered. A large collection of questions amassed. The weight and volume of those questions were guiding instructions and future prompts alone. But I appreciated the great awareness and working knowledge developed just from listening and reflecting on everyone else’s questions.

Since then, my curatorial approach has been to ask new questions in addition to responding to what is missing. Continuing with the unique opportunity and privileges afforded me, I strive to test our capacity to flex and be nimble. As NCCAkron works to strengthen the national dance ecosystem and simultaneously serve as a catalyst for advancement, conversations with artists and observations across the country raise questions concerning the creation of work, its audience, and its broader purpose. In particular: how can we invest in and augment other aspects of the field at large?

The cultivation of dance writing is one experimental way to explore this question. In 2017–18, NCCAkron hosted a year-long Low-Residency Dance Writing Lab including writers from across the country: Sima Belmar (Berkeley, CA), Betsy Brandt (St. Louis, MO), Kathryn Dammers (Philadelphia, PA), Benedict Nguyen (Brooklyn, NY), and Lauren Warnecke (Chicago, IL). We identified these dance writers through an open call and application process. They came from many different perspectives both in and outside of academia. Together we wrestled with and ruminated on what dance writing is and what it could be:

– A piece of art in its own right?

– Power?

– A documentation of ephemerality?

– Validation?

– An extension of the artist? Or for the artform?

– About seeing dance right or wrong?

– Advocating for the audience or for everyone other than the audience?

– A by-product of the dance itself?

That year, the Low-Res Dance Writers tried on different ways of writing about dance—playing with form, limitations, audience, print versus online output, etc. Besides the series of products and written exercises produced, two process-based outcomes also emerged that year: (1) a social network with alternative streams of distribution based on the relationships among these writers created a whole other platform where they not only engaged with but also invited each other to publish work across their individual communities; and (2) the ongoing responsibility that accompanies the privilege of writing about an artist’s work.

The Low-Res Dance Writing Lab also illuminated some other cracks in our ecosystem. We received more applications from dance writers than any other opportunity NCCAkron had offered. While demonstrating proof of concept, this also showed the dearth of spaces to nurture, convene, and support dance writing. One of the Lab’s opportunities included convening the group in New York City around the Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference (APAP). Although this is a major event in the field, most of these writers had not attended before. Even though APAP offers the potential to attend ten-plus festivals in a single weekend and witness numerous dance artists firsthand, the prevailing business of dance touring often discourages potential advocates like dance writers from engaging. They could not easily see anywhere they would be welcome, valued, or able to engage if they were not directly tasked to write a review.

NCCAkron cannot just live inside the cracks of our ecosystem. We must also stretch to fill in some of those gaps and build a stronger foundation for all to dance upon. The Low-Res Dance Writing Lab experience revealed the many different roles that dance writing could play. The immediate possibilities of archive and documentation were intensified by the responsibility NCCAkron can embody as an advocate for undertold and lesser-seen stories in the dance field. In addition to creating more opportunities to share or distribute this new working knowledge, I am also personally interested if we can push for a more conversational and welcoming style of writing about dance, akin to creative nonfiction. It was with these beliefs that NCCAkron entered a series partnership with The University of Akron Press and its director, Jon Miller.

Hope Mohr, who had curated and presented the Reorganizing Ourselves event that had so affected me a few years before, was one of the first people I approached to join our foray into dance writing. I first witnessed Hope Mohr’s choreographic work in 2012, at her invitation to attend The Bridge Project’s performances that year. Shortly thereafter, Hope was brought on as a three-year Resident Artist at ODC Theater. We began and continued a collegial friendship—questioning the relationship her choreographic work had to The Bridge Project itself and seeking to evolve the administrative infrastructure supporting both her choreography and the curatorial platform. We knew the ten-year anniversary of The Bridge Project was approaching in 2020. While a benchmark moment, it also made us ask what such an achievement means. What value could noting this moment have for the future of the dance ecosystem?

In this book—edited by Michèle Steinwald, also of Reorganizing Ourselves—I appreciate how Mohr both documents ten years of public programs for choreographers and dance students to reference and also reflects on shifts in power in the cultural sector at large. She makes visible the evolution of operating context. The Bridge Project was originally about creating critical discourse and dialogue within the Bay Area dance community and bridging that work with artists elsewhere (primarily in New York City). In its more recent state, the curatorial platform has been steadily building another bridge (or an entire highway system) between the role of artist and activist.

I invite you to read this book and ask new questions. How is your operating context—your community—shifting? Who, and what, is missing? Who has the power? How can we challenge what we think we know? What experiments to shift within your own power might you make? NCCAkron and I are here to support all aspects of the creative process in an effort to foster the manifestation of new choreographic work and a stronger dance field as we continue to evolve towards more liberated thinking, making, and dancing.

Foreword

Curating Oneself Out of the Room

Michèle Steinwald

I have long craved practical, hands-on language describing curatorial processes in the performing arts, particularly for dance programming. Shifting Cultural Power is a dream come true. In this book, Hope Mohr takes an honest, disarming approach to mapping out the stories within The Bridge Project, resulting in a refreshingly relatable publication that is part handbook, part archive, a pinch of memoir, and complementary somatic explorations.

In January 2015, Christy Bolingbroke, then the Deputy Director for Advancement at ODC Theater in San Francisco, introduced Mohr and me. We were all in New York City for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (now the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, aka APAP) conference. Bolingbroke and I had been in conversation around presenting Reorganizing Ourselves, a three-hour, salon-style think tank I codesigned and facilitated, incorporating two performative lectures, one by Judson Dance Theater choreographer Deborah Hay and the other by Bay Area philosophy professor Alva Noë. She knew that including out-of-towners (Hay and me) in her season programming at ODC would be a hard sell, even with a renowned artist such as Hay.

Bolingbroke wisely steered Mohr and me toward one another, knowing that my collaboration closely aligned with Hope Mohr Dance’s curatorial platform, The Bridge Project. The early years of The Bridge Project centered on influential Judson-era choreographers Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Simone Forti, alongside Bay Area dance makers; adding Hay’s performative lecture was in keeping with that model. Our first meeting led Mohr to incorporate Reorganizing Ourselves into The Bridge Project’s 2015 program, Rewriting Dance. Mohr and I have been colleagues and supporters of one another’s work, albeit from a distance, ever since.

Moved by what I was seeing and reading in The Bridge Project’s annual programming announcement emails, I was particularly struck by its 2017 Radical Movements: Gender and Politics in Performance, which came out just as the #MeToo movement was going viral. Most of us had been expecting America’s first female president to be in office and were still reeling from the election. The collision of gender and politics gave us an urgent reason to curate. Between the artists’ names and photos listed, gender representation in that issue was broadly displayed and defiantly redefined for a general public. The platform’s curatorial backbone was firmly asserted.

At the time, I deeply wished I could fly to San Francisco, attend Radical Movements, and experience the performances and dialogues firsthand. I would have loved to witness how audiences participated from their seats, to feel the room, the resonance between the artists and audience members in real time. Flash forward: this book offers the next best thing, including somatic prompts for relating kinesthetically to the concepts behind The Bridge Project’s curatorial programming.

While Radical Movements marched on, the male gaze continued to invade society as well as performing arts offerings in my local community. Time was pressing for a curatorial platform to speak directly to feminism and matters concerning consent. Mohr’s thoughtfulness was evident in 2017’s artistic planning. Shifting Cultural Power catalogues the circumstances around Radical Movements within The Bridge Project’s entire programmatic history.