Hope Mohr Dance: 'Failure of the Sign'

Katharine Hawthorne, Tegan Schwab, Roche Janken of
Hope Mohr Dance in Hope Mohr's
"Failure of the Sign is the Sign." Photo: Margo Moritz.

Hope Mohr Dance: 'Failure of the Sign':

A fascination with the relationship between language and movement was the springboard for Hope Mohr's latest dance work, "Failure of the Sign Is the Sign," which debuts at ODC Theater this weekend on a program that the 6-year-old Hope Mohr Dance company will share with New York-based choreographer Susan Rethorst.

"I've always been interested in brain and body in conversation or in antagonism," says Mohr, who is an artist-in-residence at ODC Theater. "I'm a dancer, but I'm also a writer. My experience of being a writer and of language is very cerebral, and my experience of being a dancer is very somatic; so I was interested in how those two things collide. For this piece, I wanted to focus on the moment when we learn to speak, which often happens around the age of 1, and investigate that experience of funneling sensation into speech as an archetypal transition into selfhood, a laying down of the foundation for who we are."

Mohr, who has two young children, was attracted by the notion that the moment of learning to speak might also represent a separation from one's mother, the start of a journey into individuality with the inevitable sense of loss that arises from that. Thus, improvisation with "sounding" is where she began her process, she says.

"I don't know if I've ever seen a piece with dancers talking where it worked for me," she says matter-of-factly, "So in this, the dancers aren't really singing or speaking, but rather sounding consonants, vowels, getting at the sound of a kinetic experience. We were trying to link the voice to physical experience from a purely sensing place, that is, not going through the cerebral."

In addition to a soundscape composed by musician Caroline Shaw, Mohr's choreography will get a visceral and visual jolt from artist Katrina Rodabaugh's outsize soft sculptures, which resemble giant internal organs - heart, lungs, intestines - and which are strewn throughout the space.

"For me, it felt related to the idea of motherhood," Mohr says, "and to the investigation into an internal emotional landscape. Our relationships to our mothers is a template for intimacy that has reverberations in our lives as adults. So the work has become a lot about the search for connection, and how that might be ruptured in that moment of learning to speak."

"It's my hope that this piece will offer vivid, compelling imagery that resonates with your own emotional territory. It's a very personal piece," says Mohr.