Hope Mohr Dance to Premiere BACCHAE BEFORE at Joe Good Annex

Hope Mohr Dance has announced the world premiere of Bacchae Before, a dance theater project inspired by the tragedies of gender reveal parties and Anne Carson's Bakkhai. Co-directed by playwright Maxe Crandall and choreographer Hope Mohr, Bacchae Before features a quartet of performers and original puppetry.

Bacchae Before is the second phase of a two-part project that began as a film. It is the second major collaboration between Crandall and Mohr, who in 2018 premiered extreme lyric I ("I" the first-person pronoun, not the Roman numeral) inspired by Anne Carson's translations of Sappho's poetry. "In extreme lyric I, we move around and through what we take to be Sappho's feminist and queer forms of erotic independence and radical embodiment," wrote Crandall and Mohr in a program note.

Crandall and Mohr's latest work continues their exploration of gender in dialogue with Carson's translations. Euripedes' The Bacchae tells the tragedy of the murder of Pentheus, King of Thebes, at the hands of his own mother, who has joined a cult of wild women bewitched by Dionysus. Carson's retelling centers the opposition between the rigid, authoritarian Pentheus and the sensual, maneuvering Dionysus. Against Pentheus' defense of the social order, Dionysus instigates a series of transgressions. By portraying Pentheus as a closeted queer, Carson raises the stakes for the king's decision, under the sway of Dionysus, to spy upon his mother and the women in the woods. "Costume is flesh," she writes in a preliminary chapter, building on Euripedes' implicit critique of traditional social roles.

In Bacchae Before, passages from Carson's translation bump up against a new script by Crandall involving gender reveal parties where parents-to-be announce the gender of their fetus in high-stakes theatrical events.

"These parties often have bizarre and tragic outcomes from devastating wildfires to the deaths of the expectant parents," notes Mohr. "But the moment of reveal is a fiction because, as the ancient Greeks believed, anything can come alive at any time. This project embraces the fluidity of gender. Through hybrid performance, we're interested in collapsing outdated categories -- not only male and female, but also set choreography and improvisation, metered time and non-metered time, dance and language."

"Bacchae Before is going to be our 'disco play,'" says Crandall. "Ancient Greek tragedy required the breaking of linear time. Violence happens offstage, and we learn about it later. I'm interested in queering these gaps of time, getting lost in them. Ironically, for Greek tragedies to assert their absolutist moral code, they must imagine and dramatize escapes, resistance and otherworlds. For us, those other horizons, other ways include disco."

Performing multiple roles in Bacchae Before will be actors Wiley Namman Strasser and Silk Worm, together with dancers Belinda He and Karla Quintero.

Also joining the ensemble is classics professor and puppeteer Mike Chin, who will employ an array of found objects-as-puppets, from toys to pine cones. "In the ancient world, there was a commonplace view that humans were like children in relation to the gods," said Chin. "Try as they might, humans were ultimately not in control of events. For Bacchae Before, I'm interested in creating tableaus that invite us into that kind of childish helplessness. I'm also interested in how the arrangement of objects can exert a power over our feelings, either reinforcing the emotional beats in a narrative or working in counterpoint to it."

Excerpts from Euripides' Bakkhai, a new version by Anne Carson, will be used in the performances with permission from and by special arrangement with United Talent Agency. Bacchae Before was made possible through support from San Francisco's Grants for the Arts, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and generous individual donors.

For more information visit hopemohr.org/Bacchae.