HMD proudly announces the Bridge Project’s 10th Anniversary Program

POWER SHIFT: Improvisation, Activism, and Community
September - November 2020

FEATURING
Members of The HIVE (Bay Area) ⧫ Byb Chanel Bibene (Bay Area) ⧫ Nigel Campbell (NYC) ⧫ Sherwood Chen (Marseille/Bay Area) ⧫ Jaime Cortez (Bay Area) ⧫ Yalini Dream (NYC) ⧫ Rosemary Hannon (Bay Area) ⧫ Tammy Johnson (Bay Area) ⧫ Liz Lerman (Arizona) ⧫ Paloma McGregor (NYC) ⧫ Amy Miller (NYC) ⧫ Hope Mohr (Bay Area) ⧫ Maurice Moore (Bay Area) ⧫ Ranu Mukherjee (Bay Area) ⧫ Michael Orange (Bay Area) ⧫ Onye Ozuzu (Gainesville, Florida) ⧫ Jarrel Phillips (San Francisco) ⧫ randy reyes (Bay Area) ⧫ Judith Sánchez Ruíz (Berlin) ⧫ Beatrice Thomas (Bay Area)

TICKETS: Available at hmd.simpletix.com.

SINGLE EVENTS
Intensive……..$150
Single Art & Activism Workshop*……..$100 - $250, sliding scale
Single Performance……..$0 - $100, sliding scale

Anti-Racism Training*…….. $5 - $250, sliding scale (SOLD OUT)
Single Practice*…….. $20
5-day Practice Series w/ Sherwood Chen……..$75 / Drop-In: $10 - $30, sliding scale

Imagining the Future Workshop for Immigrant & Refugee Artists*……..FREE (SOLD OUT)

*No one turned away for lack of funds to these events

FESTIVAL PASSES & DISCOUNTS
Performance Pass …….. $50
Includes admission for all four Power Shift live streamed performances

10% off ……..when you register for 2 events
15% off……....when you register for 3 or more events
Email admin@hopemohr.org for a discount code to use at checkout. Discount codes only valid when registering for multiple events.

To inquire about additional financial assistance, please email admin@hopemohr.org

EVENT CALENDAR

ART & ACTIVISM WORKSHOPS
Workshops for artists, social workers, educators, activists, nonprofit professionals, and anyone interested in how embodiment can support social change. Through improvisation, vocalization, and other creative tools, each workshop offers practical and theoretical tools for connecting deep embodiment to social justice work, legal advocacy, teaching, strategic visioning, and more. No movement background is necessary. With the exception of Imagining the Future, all workshops will take place online on Zoom.

SEP 13: Imagining the Future | Ranu Mukherjee and Hope Mohr, in partnership with ARTogether
SEP 26: Artists as Agents of Change | Co-facilitated by Gibney Company directors Nigel Campbell and Amy Miller
OCT 17: Anti-Racism Training for the Dance Community | Beatrice Thomas, In partnership with Dance Mission Theater & Kambara+
OCT 18: A Conversation about Aesthetic Equity  | Jaime Cortez, Liz Lerman, Paloma McGregor, & Michael Orange
NOV 21 - 22: The Keystone of the Arch: Embodied 100 Years Vision | Tammy Johnson & Yalini Dream

IMPROVISATION INTENSIVES
Workshops for movers who love to improvise and/or  want to expand their practice through in depth study. Each intensive shares one leading artist's approach and tools to improvisation. Previous dance/movement training recommended to participate. Professional experience as a dance improviser and performer required to participate in Judith Sánchez Ruíz's YOUR OWN GOD intensive. All intensives will take place online via Zoom.

OCT 5-9: YOUR OWN GOD | Judith Sánchez Ruíz
OCT 19-23: DAILY IMPROVISATION PRACTICE | Sherwood Chen
OCT 31 & NOV 1: Space Carcasses | Onye Ozuzu (postponed until 2021)

2-HOUR IMPROVISATION PRACTICES
A series of 2 hour improvisation practices led by outstanding Bay Area improvisers suitable for movers of all abilities. Practices will draw inspiration from a wide range of sources to create improvisation experiences that resist capitalism in the body, bring us in harmony with the natural world, and cultivate entangled collectivity. No movement background necessary to participate. All practices will take place at an outdoor SF location.

OCT 24: Exploring Not Knowing: Artmaking through the Senses | Rosemary Hannon & Maurice Moore
OCT 24: BYOI (Bring Your Own Intention) Experiments in Embodied Accountability | Facilitated by Daria Garina & Bhumi Patel for The HIVE

OCT 25: Transformational Magic Squares | Byb Chanel Bibene (postponed until 2021)

IMPROVISATION PERFORMANCES
A selection of cutting-edge performances by leading improvisors that inspire power, joy, and rumination.

OCT 2: Real Talk # 1: Vectors of Adverse Desire | randy reyes
OCT 9: Free Play | Jarrel Phillips
OCT 10: Encaje | Judith Sánchez Ruíz
OCT 11: PURPLE is | Judith Sánchez Ruíz, with sam wentz

Visit hmd.simpletix.com for tickets to Power Shift performances and to register for workshops, intensives, and practices.

HMD's commitment to bringing people together through art and dialogue drives everything we do. We are currently in dialogue with POWER SHIFT artists to reimagine events that bring us together safely as we navigate the covid-19 pandemic. All POWER SHIFT events will take place in the digital space, or in-person at outdoor locations with restrictions on capacity and ample space for safe distancing. Masks will be required at in-person events. All events are subject to change, visit this page or sign up to our e-newsletter to receive updates.  We look forward to sharing art and community with you this coming fall.
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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

POWER SHIFT: Improvisation, Activism, and Community invites artists and activists to share the practice and performance of improvisation. Co-curated by Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero, POWER SHIFT brings you inside the improvisational practices of Black/African American, Latinx/Latin American, Asian American, female-identifying and queer improvisers and social justice activists. The program highlights voices from African dance, jazz aesthetics, social and street dance, contemporary forms, and Capoeira.

POWER SHIFT is about more than performance. A wide array of intensives and workshops at the intersection of dance and social action offer opportunities to build and share tools for the creative process. In these spaces, we will move and imagine together. We will cultivate power and resilience in the face of shifting and uncertain landscapes. 
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FULL EVENT DETAILS 
Visit hmd.simpletix.com for tickets to Power Shift performances and to register for workshops, intensives, and practices.

Sunday September 13, 2020, 12-4 PM
Imagining the Future | Ranu Mukherjee and Hope Mohr, in partnership with ARTogether
Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants, 544 International Boulevard, Oakland 
THIS WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE OUTDOORS WITH MASKS AND SOCIAL DISTANCING
SOLD OUT

Imagining the Future is a storybuilding workshop focused on imagining how we want to live into the future. Painters, dancers, musicians, photographers - we welcome artists from all mediums to bring their stories, learn from each other and create and collaborate. We will work through a series of prompts that open up ways of expressing your experiences and desires in writing, movement and drawing. We will create a safe and experimental space to explore and generate new ideas.
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Saturday, September 26, 10 AM - 2 PM PDT
Artists as Agents of Change | Co-facilitated by Gibney Company directors Nigel Campbell and Amy Miller
THIS WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE VIA ZOOM

Artists as Agents of Change workshop acknowledges the incredible humanity and expertise in every room and celebrates a diversity of perspectives as vital through Gibney’s philosophy for action: look inside, speak through movement, work together and take care. This workshop introduces participants to Gibney's Community Action Model of addressing and preventing gender-based violence, as well as mobilizing the arts as a vehicle for social change. Facilitated by Campbell and Miller, the workshop includes both participatory and theoretical elements and is open to artists, social workers, educators and activists interested in cross-sector exchange around embodied social change.
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Friday October 2, 2020, 8 PM PDT
Real Talk # 1: Vectors of Adverse Desire | randy reyes
THIS PERFORMANCE WILL BE LIVE STREAMED

About Real Talk # 1: Vectors of Adverse Desire
bb, do you notice the things getting in your way? i touch myself first in order to re-member. viscosity through the body until I become the space itself. undoing shame by naming the shame directly. is watching porn bad? does something else exist in the underground of your desire? language drip drips dripping as you find pulsing pleasure practice partners on the dance floor. yearning for...myself? again and again.
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Monday - Friday, October 5-9
Session #1: 9 - 9:45 AM  |  Session #2: 10 - 10:45 AM  |  Session #3: 11 - 11:45 AM (PDT for all times)
YOUR OWN GOD | Judith Sánchez Ruíz
THIS WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE VIA ZOOM

Individualized Coaching in Improvisation and Performance with Judith Sanchez Ruiz. Professional experience as a dance improviser and performer required to participate.

A unique opportunity to receive individualized coaching in intimate groups of three artists under the mentorship of internationally-acclaimed dancer Judith Sanchez Ruiz. This workshop over five consecutive days, each day a 45-minute session, will feature practical exercises, dialogue, and prompts for play. Work with Judith will re-set your process, help you internalize new practices, and connect your Mind, Body, and Imagination. Topics will include:

• Improvisation: Scores & Equations / Time / Composition / Creativity

• Choreography: Structure / Process & Research / Vocabulary / Composition / Equation / Leadership

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Friday October 9, 2020, 8 PM PDT
Free Play | Jarrel Phillips 
THIS PERFORMANCE WILL BE LIVE STREAMED

About Free Play: Joy is, both, freedom and resistance. Capoeira is, too.The best part about Capoeira is that you play it. It is pure improvisation. I can't tell you exactly what I'm going to do because it's all spontaneous and in relationship to the music, my partner and the ashé (energy). What I do know is that I'm going to enjoy myself. “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” - Audre Lorde
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Saturday October 10, 2020, 12 PM PDT
Encaje | Judith Sánchez Ruíz
THIS PERFORMANCE WILL BE LIVE STREAMED

 What can I love? a country, an arm, a doll, a new brand? We scratch our hearts with the patience of a farmer in a glittering landscape. JSR 

"Encaje" is a piece about hypocrisy, and it is inspired by the body of work of writer Anaïs Nin. Working with two concepts, the "diary" and the "radio".  Judith Sánchez Ruíz recaptures the snapshot contents of an archive of her own days approaching dance like a „diary of movement." with reinvents the untold, the undisclosed presence of disorder and vulnerability. The “radio" concept lets the body jump from one state to another as if someone turned the dial on an old radio trying to find a new frequency, thereby provoking a clash of opposing facts within one life, one body.  
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Sunday, October 11, 12 PM PDT
PURPLE is | Judith Sánchez Ruíz, with sam wentz
THIS PERFORMANCE WILL BE LIVE STREAMED

“PURPLE is”, the fourth iteration of Judith Sánchez Ruíz’s improvisational duet form in homage to the late choreographer Trisha Brown, takes place over Zoom with fellow Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) alum Sam Wentz (2009-14). Judith’s homage connects dancers and collaborators from the company’s 50+ year span. Previous renditions of this tribute have been performed with Lance Gries, Laurel Jenkins, and Jodi Melnick. 

This version of “PURPLE is” will connect alumni of the company across both time and space, with Sánchez Ruíz live streaming from Berlin and Wentz from Los Angeles. The distance between the performers--5,781 miles--will produce a 10 second delay in their connection. The performers, in their respective locations, will utilize projectors to engage with life-size versions of the each other. Spanning across geographic, experiential, historical, and temporal distance, the performers will reach for intimacy in isolation. 

The last segment of the performance will be a Q and A among the dancers and the audience moderated by Hope Mohr, also an alumna of TBDC. By bookending the dancing with talking, the performers acknowledge that history lives on and expands through both oral and physical language.

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Saturday October 17, 12-3 PM PDT
Anti-Racism Training for the Dance Community | Beatrice Thomas, in partnership with Dance Mission Theater & Kambara+
THIS WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE VIA ZOOM

Open to the general public.
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Sunday October 18, 1 - 2:30 PM PDT
A Conversation about Aesthetic Equity   | Jaime Cortez, Liz Lerman, Paloma McGregor, & Michael Orange
Moderated by HMD’s Director of Art in Community Cherie Hill
THIS WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE VIA ZOOM

Join panelists Jaime Cortez, Liz Lerman, Paloma McGregor, and Michael Orange for a conversation on aesthetic equity and aesthetic bias in the arts. Moderated by choreographer and HMD Director of Art in Community Cherie Hill.  The moderated conversation will be followed by small group dialogues and a full audience Q&A with the event organizers and panelists.
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Monday - Friday, October 19-23, 10 AM - 12 PM PDT
Daily Improvisation Practice | Sherwood Chen
ALL PRACTICES WILL TAKE ONLINE VIA ZOOM

Sherwood Chen proposes glimpses into past and current movement research, leading to improvisation practice. Points of departure for movement exploration vary daily and include, subject to change: slowing down movement as a strategy to overheat kinesthetic attention; applying sensorial memory to render impossible landscapes in the flesh; moving from seeing without using our eyes; and heraldic experimentations with the weight of our sage bones. Each session builds towards self- and / or partner-generated improvisations. Except when there are break-out room discussions / exchanges / witnessing, a large part of each session will not require participants to look at a screen.*

Have a notebook, keyboard or audio recorder for your own reflections, enough floor space to lay down, an image of the day to share on your profile screen (i.e. the image we see when your cameras are off ), and a selection of music / sound you enjoy moving to in your own space.
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Saturday October 24, 11 AM-1 PM
Exploring Not Knowing: Artmaking though the Senses | Rosemary Hannon & Maurice Moore
SF outdoor location: Location information will be sent to those who register for this event

Maurice Moore and Rosemary Hannon will facilitate improvisational work with material collaboration. Maurice will explore mark making with other senses. Rosemary will offer pausing practice and collaborative wandering in an overlapping, timed group score. These scores are open-ended propositions for a shared practice that values doing ‘nothing productive’ for both embodied pleasure and the resistance of capitalist values.
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Saturday October 24, 1:30 PM-3:30 PM 
BYOI (Bring Your Own Intention) Experiments in Embodied Accountability | Facilitated by Daria Garina & Bhumi Patel for The HIVE
SF outdoor location: Location information will be sent to those who register for this event

What does it feel like to show up to a difficult situation as your highest self? What does it look like to take accountability and make amends for harm we've caused? How do we embody Transformative Justice? Let's try it on! 
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Sunday October 25, 1:30-3:30 PM
Transformational Magic Squares | Byb Chanel Bibene
POSTPONED UNTIL 2021

Transformational Squares, aka magic Squares, is a movement workshop based on specific prompt improvisation. Its particularity is to explore how emotions shift the movement experience under the influence of either the natural elements or everyday life events. In the workshop, students will explore the body mapping through levels and dynamics schema.
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Saturday October 31 & Sunday November 1, 9 AM - 4 PM PDT
Space Carcasses | Onye Ozuzu
ONLINE VIA ZOOM
POSTPONED UNTIL 2021

The Space Carcasses workshop will invite participants to explore psychosomatic shifts experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national reckoning over racial injustice. How do the spaces in our present day-to-day activities “become the carcasses of our earlier lives…places to visit versions of ourselves that once were?” 

Participants will be asked to engage their body as a reference point for the experience of space as defined by architecture, by the objects and the utilizations that they share that space with, and by their intentional connections to one another, across distances and through the medium of video and online communication. The current moment, one that has so dramatically removed us from, or re configured our occupancy of our habitual spaces, has raised our awareness of the power of our relationship to our built environment. It has made carcasses of sorts, of the places and spaces that our lives so recently used to occupy.

Embodied improvised practice will be used to explore that awareness; explore, expand and utilize its options. Workshop discussions and collaborations will investigate our capacity to fold distance through intentional action and coordinated place making. This is a dynamic and experimental workshop, designed to engage our available technologies and capacity to define our sense of self-- to reimagine what it means to be in “place”. 

Before day one, participants will receive a care package with workshop essentials. Day one they will be paired with another dancer and begin initial discussions on how to use cellphones to record your movement research. We will engage actively in online whole group sessions and with partners for around 4 hours each of the two days. Sessions will be in two units with a significant break between to explore supporting reference materials, rest, take care of individual needs, and prepare for the upcoming session. At the end of the workshop participants will have access to a follow up site where edited video amalgamations of their movement research. Will be made viewable and final discussions, sharings, and feedback may happen online and on a flexible timeline.
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Saturday & Sunday November 21-22, 12-5 PM PDT
The Keystone of the Arch: Embodied 100 Years Vision | Tammy Johnson & Yalini Dream
ONLINE VIA ZOOM

Here we are. We are living in a historical moment that demands that we shed systems of oppression and pivot toward wholeness, healing and justice. But how? How do we bridge the wisdom of the past with hope for the future? If we understand ourselves in the middle of a 100-year arch of human transformation, the arch’s keystone, how can we prepare ourselves to show up fully and engage each other with integrity? On day one we will explore how we navigate conflict and dynamic tension. Day two will involve dream work that weaves together a vision beyond the current moment of struggle. Yalini Dream and Tammy Johnson will guide participants through practices that explore individual and group habits, and envision liberatory futures  using movement, vocalization and other creative tools. This workshop is open to artists, activists, organizations, social workers, and any persons looking to engage in transformative movement building.