Hope Mohr Dance Kicks Off Home Season Tonight

Hope Mohr Dance is proud to announce the program for its seventh Home Season featuring three world premieres.

As a testament to Mohr's vision as one of the Bay Area's leaders in postmodern dance, this year the company explores a program dedicated to experimentation in choreographic form by its namesake founder. The company's annual Bridge Project, dedicated to presenting the work of outstanding choreographers from outside the Bay Area, will take place as a stand-alone event in September. Mohr's Home Season features three world premieres, including Route 20, a trio; ridetherhythm, a work for dancers and actors; and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, a full-company work set to a live jazz score. Hope Mohr Dance's seventh Home Season is produced in association with ODC Theater and runs today to Sunday, April 10 - 13, 2014.

Hope Mohr Dance's full-company premiere, titled Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, is a collaboration with jazz trumpet player Henry Hung alongside Noah Phillips and Eric Garland. In Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction Mohr treats the dancers as agents of both kinesthetic and aural intelligence. Working with the musicians, the dancers create sound through microphones placed strategically throughout the performing space; the musicians then interpret the dancers' sounds by way of electronic effects processing and further improvisation.

"Improvisation is a hallmark of jazz, of course, but it's also been a central tool in my own choreographic process," says Mohr. "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction integrates improvisational techniques with more calculated aspects of choreography. One of my objects in this piece is to expose the underlying structures in the process of art-making. For example, ephemera from the rehearsal process, such as conversations among the artists in rehearsal, are part of the soundscape. Other textures in the sound palette include set musical composition, spoken and recorded text and the sounds of dancing bodies."

Included in the mix of spoken and recorded text is Mohr's own original poetry. The title of the dance comes from a Wallace Stevens poem that names three ideal aspects of poetry: "It must be abstract," "It must change" and "It must give pleasure."

Hope Mohr Dance's seventh Home Season also includes the world premiere of Route 20, a piece showcasing high-stakes partnering for three dancers. Animalistic gesture creates a sustained mood of tension between romantic love and sexual desire. At the level of form, the tension between love and desire is explored as the performers must navigate a minefield of improvised partnering moments -- moments in which the outcome is unknown -- within the context of set choreography.

In contrast to the other works on the program, ridetherhythm represents a series of investigations into the relationship between spoken word and movement. Against a formal gestural landscape, ridetherhythm is a linguistic and stylistic smash-up that places Anne Carson's version of Antigone in conversation with the character of the housewife suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome in Todd Haynes' movie Safe. Here are two iconic women who resist sinister environmental forces and renounce family to travel their own road. The premiere features a mixed cast of actors and dancers, including Megan Brian, director of Public Programs and Education for SFMOMA, as a mad linguistic scientist commenting on the action.

Performers in Hope Mohr Dance's seventh Home Season include returning company dancers Jeremy Bannon-Neches, James Graham, Katharine Hawthorne, Roche Janken, David Schleiffers, and Tegan Schwab.

Performances begin at 8pm Thursday through Saturday, April 10 - 12, 2014, and at 2pm on Sunday, April 13. Tickets range between $20 to $40 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.

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