Above: Simone Forti leading her "Huddle" score as part of the 2014 Bridge Project
PRESS
--Rita Felciano, “An epic, equitable ‘Power Shift’ for Hope Mohr Dance’s latest,” 48 Hills September 27, 2020
--Claudia Bauer, “2020–21 Season Preview: The In-the-Works Shows We're Looking Forward to Most,” Dance Magazine September 10, 2020
--Lily Janiak, “Diverse Paths for Dismantling White Hierarchies,” SF Chronicle August 5, 2020
--Suzannah Friscia, “Repeating History - Is the Dance World Too Precious with its Classic Works?,” Dance Magazine January 2020
--Leena Joshi, “The Sounds We’re Hearing Are the Sounds of a Gay Ghost, ” SF MOMA Open Space December 09, 2019
--Garth Grimball, “A Bridge to Cunningham in Six Quotations, ” Life as a Modern Dancer November 26, 2019
--“Merce Cunningham-Inspired Performances Premiere at ODC Theater This Weekend, ” KQED Arts the DO List November 2019
--Sima Belmar, “An Invitation to Stumble, ” ODC Dance Stories November 16, 2019
"ambitious, challenging and often mesmerizing”
--Rita Felciano, “‘The Body Is the Brain’ - Hope Mohr",” DanceViewTimes November 8, 2019
--Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener, & Claudia La Rocco, “Already & Not Yet: Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener in Conversation with Claudia La Rocco, ” SF MOMA Open Space November 7, 2019
--KALW’s Open Air with host David Latulippe, November 7, 2019
“remarkable and varied works bridging past and future - just the sort of paths, I imagine, Cunningham himself would want to take”
--Melissa Hudson Bell, “Dancing with a Ghost: Bay Area artists honor Merce Cunningham, ” SF Chronicle November 4, 2019
--Ruth Gebreyesus, “Mobile Homes, ” SF MOMA Open Space October 31, 2019
“Hope Mohr Dance honors an iconic American choreographer with the forward-tilting 2019 Bridge Project”
--Lou Fancher, “Merce Cunningham’s Century,” San Francisco Classical Voice October 29, 2019
—Hope Mohr, “Self and System, ” SF MOMA Open Space October 24, 2019
"Signals from the West “encourages a critical, probing engagement with Cunningham, one befitting the artist’s own restless disposition"
--Sam Lefebvre, “Merce Cunningham Artist Residency Celebrates, Challenges Dance Luminary,” KQED Arts August 26, 2019
"The initiative promises not only premieres, but also searching conversation as to what dance — this most ephemeral and physically vulnerable of arts — has to offer as its connecting essence during disconnected times…. a fresh encounter with Cunningham’s legacy"
--Rachel Howard, “Fall Bay Area dance includes Merce Cunningham and Johnny Cash,” SF Chronicle’s Fall Arts Preview August 19, 2019
"Mohr's politics around curation seeks to address imbalances between 'established' and 'emerging' artists ... Her programming continues to ask how to build a 'we' in performance that includes audiences in the conversation."
--Michelle LaVigne and Megan Nicely, “Curating Dialogue: The Bridge Project’s Radical Movements,” TDR: The Drama Review 62:4 (TD40) Winter 2018
HMD’s Bridge Project “connects history and the present moment, art and intellectual probing."
--Dance Magazine
“[The Bridge Project] annually recruits the prime movers of American Postmodernism.”
—Alan Ulrich, "Fall Arts Preview," S.F. Chronicle, August 15, 2014
"The Bridge Project reimagines and even celebrates conversation as a form that brings us body to body. What can we do, together, with the bodies that we have? And what can we do with the bodies that we have together? At the conjured intersections between different ways of doing, these collaborations suggest how we can tend to the queer bonds between bodies and ideas. " -- Maxe Crandall and Selby Schwartz, Movement Research, December 14, 2017 (reviewing the 2017 Bridge Project)
"Netta Yerushalmy made a stunning San Francisco debut with an abridged version of her 'Paramodernities...Paramodernities is to contemporary dance what fellow Guggenheim award winner Taylor Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” is to popular music. Both deconstruct laissez faire naïveté of cultural assumptions; both give attention to the queer voice, their contributions to society and their suppression throughout modern history. And both match sharp intelligence with fluid unconventional performance, demystifying the arts along the way and proving that perception, like gender, is multifaceted."
-- David E. Moreno, Paramodernities, Culture Vulture, February 23, 2018 (reviewing the 2018 Bridge Project)
"Ordinary Practices of the Radical Body will go down in my personal history as the greatest lec-dem of all time. Picture it: two queer icons alone together on the dance floor, step-touching their way through theories of gender, embodied identity, and precarity. Their dancing demonstrated that the philosopher has a body and the dancer has a mind—in other words, everyone is a bodymind—and the toll dancing and scholarly labor takes on the body was made visible by their talk about it."
-- Sima Belmar, In Practice: Body Nerds: Judith Butler and Monique Jenkinson, In Dance, January 1, 2018 (reviewing the 2017 Bridge Project)
"The evening served up an accessible and stimulating blend of sophisticated queer theory and radical politics alongside personal anecdote and a modest but sincere lovefest across the disciplinary divide...There was an unspoken but palpable sense of disorientation, along with the slightly giddy wonder at what might happen, when two mutually admiring representatives of two mutually exclusive worlds (art and academe, for short) let their respective guards down."
-- Robert Avila, "A philosopher and a drag queen meet on a dance floor...", 48 Hills, December 7, 2017 (reviewing the 2017 Bridge Project)
"For several years Hope Mohr's Bridge Project has connected history and the present moment, art and intellectual probing."
-- "His/Her/Their Moves", Dance Magazine, November, 2017
"The space they occupied transcended the theater stage to become the larger political sphere..."
-- Marie Tollon, "A Gender Theorist and a Drag Performer Walk into a Theater", ODC Dance Stories, November 15, 2017
"This year’s festival in particular is meant to unite artists, activists, and academics around the issue of gender equality — inviting performers to explore what it means to have a radical body through their respective mediums. And, with a program that features academics and performance groups, this year’s Bridge Project makes that goal a reality. "
-- Eda Yu, "An Academic and a Drag Performer Dialogue Through Dance", KQED Arts, November 9, 2017
"Hope Mohr is perennially inquisitive. The intellectual curiosity evident in her choreography extends to the intriguing, post-modern dance experiments she orchestrates each year under the imprint of the Bridge Project."
-- Carla Escoda, "Fall Dance Season Will Bring Political Fury to Bay Area Stages", KQED Arts, August 22, 2017
“Rather than creating a bridge that reinforced the distinctions between disciplines, the Bridge Project offered a view of an inclusive community—one in which complementary, rather than disparate, pursuits benefited each other and those in attendance.”
--Joe Ferguson, "Science, Philosophy and Performance Art in 'The [2015] Bridge Project,'" SciArt in America, Dec. 28, 2015
"Choreographer/dancer Hope Mohr wants us to know more than what we see on stage. Her “Bridge Project,” now in its 7th year, is an artist’s-curated initiative that opens the thinking processes that go into creation of work. She challenges the assumptions we may bring to the theater; calling what she does 'a form of community organizing, to facilitate conversation that cross discipline, geography and perspective.'”
--Rita Felciano, "Hope Mohr's Bridge Project," KQED Arts' "The Do List," November 6, 2015
"[HMD's Bridge Project] is inviting excellent, but locally little known choreographers to share the stage with her company...These [a]re intelligent and excellent evenings of dance. The Bay Area owes her."
--Rita Felciano, " Dance View Times, Vol. 31, No.4, Autumn 2014
“On Lucinda Childs’ Carnation, I propose this work for an Izzy: best reconstruction of 2014”
--Keith Hennessy, Zeroperformance.blogspot (on HMD's 2014 Bridge Project)
“Hope Mohr asks us to … pursue the thrill of live performance, of improvisation and movement that constantly questions its source.”
-- Carla Escoda, "Have We Come a Long Way Baby?", bachtrack, Sept. 29, 2014
“[A] phenomenal celebration of West Coast post-modern dance, bringing together four powerhouse choreographers in a single program.”
-- Heather Desaulniers, "The Bridge Project 2014," heatherdance.com, September 28, 2014
“The rise of curatorial activity also goes hand in hand with the rise of collaboration as the dominant mode of making.”
-- Hope Mohr, in conversation with Marie Tollon, "Four Postmodern Solos in Conversation," tripledogdare, Sept. 22, 2014 (previewing the 2014 Bridge Project)
Profile of HMD’s Bridge Project.
“Vital Signs,” Dance Magazine, March 2012.
TESTIMONIALS
"The Bridge Project is a small ray of hope in a troubled world. Creating spaces for debate, dissent, connection and collaboration, the Bridge Project offers a model for how to build arts community." --Jack Halberstam (Columbia University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Author of The Queer Art of Failure, Featured Participant in 2017 Bridge Project: Radical Movements)
“HMD’s Bridge Project fills a critical gap in the artistic and intellectual life of the Bay Area dance community by honoring the past and giving context to the present through its remarkable annual series of guest artists and events.”-- Stanford University's Dr. Janice Ross
"The Bridge Project has pushed my formal exploration of dance. I am forever grateful to have participated in this program....The [2016 Bridge Project] really changed my approach to thinking about dance and its history. [Trisha Brown Co-Artistic Director} Diane Madden's gentle approach to the body and her mode in working with people from different disciplines was life-changing for me. She was kind and patient while sharing her expertise with artists who were not trained in the field of dance. I was able to see dance as something more than a disciplinary (meaning as in something that restricts, disciplines, punishes to create form) and instead I was able to see that dance could join various ("untrained") bodies to think about movement in complex and nuanced ways that intersect with visual arts." --Xandra Ibarra, commissioned artist in the 2016 Bridge Project, Ten Artists Respond to Locus
"Hope Mohr Dance and Bridge Project create absolutely vital and much-needed discourse for Dance and Performance in the Bay Area and beyond. To have my artistic work included as an integral part of that discourse has been and will continue to be deeply valuable to me." --Monique Jenkinson, Featured Artist in 2017 Bridge Project, Radical Movements
"I see the Bridge Project as a counter-balance to th[e] propensity towards isolation [in the Bay Area]. It keeps us connected and aware of a broader history and larger artistic community. Its facilitators provide artists with tools and a space to deepen their understanding of their own artistic inclinations and intent. I suspect that this rigor and clarity with respect to intent increases our potential to engage in meaningful exchanges outside our immediate community." --Karla Quintero, Participant in the 2016 Bridge Project: Ten Artists Respond to Locus
“What the Bridge Project is offering is unparalleled in the Bay Area and deeply important…arts programs are not curated like this anywhere else.” --Artist and Workshop Participant Margit Galanter
“The Bridge Project goes beyond Mohr's work as choreographer and artistic director to lead processes often executed by performing arts presenters and venues.”-- Julie Potter, ODC Theater Director