Shifting Cultural Power

Case Studies and Questions in Performance

Hope Mohr

• Publisher: The University Of Akron Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781629221199
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Shifting Cultural Power is a reckoning with white cultural power and a call to action. The book locates the work of curating performance in conversations about social change, with a special focus on advancing racial equity in the live arts. Based on the author's journey as a dancer, choreographer, and activist, as well as on her ten years of leading The Bridge Project, a performing arts presenting platform in the Bay Area, Shifting Cultural Power invites us to imagine new models of relationship among artists and within arts organizations—models that transform our approach, rather than simply re-cast who holds power. Mohr covers such subjects as transitioning a hierarchical nonprofit to a model of distributed leadership; expanding the canon; having difficult conversations about race; and reckoning with aesthetic bias. "When we reckon with and de-center whiteness, we open imaginative space for decolonized models of artmaking and art community, " Mohr writes. "We create possibilities for shifting cultural power." Featuring case studies of socially engaged projects in the performing arts; a workbook for embodied research; an archive of The Bridge Project's ten-year history; and transcripts of landmark performance events.

Chapter 1

Curating as Community Organizing

What it Means and Why it Matters

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
—Ursula Le Guin⁷

This is a book for movement artists and cultural workers who are interested in shifting cultural power. Because white people have monopolized cultural power for so long, this book is especially for white people. African American visual artist Rashid Johnson notes how whiteness, like any racial category, is not monolithic:

I don’t believe there is a white gaze that we can speak about without delving into the complexity of whiteness. What whiteness are we talking about? Is it the white liberal? The white New Yorker? Is it European whiteness? Is there a privilege that is also qualified by a real financial agency as opposed to poverty? This produces different kinds of perspectives.⁸

For cultural shift to happen, white people need to talk to other white people about giving up power. For too long, people of color have been called upon to do this educational and emotional work. Feminist writer Judit Moschkovich says, “it is not the duty of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.”⁹ In naming white people as an audience for this book, I do not intend to focus on whiteness in the same way it is centered in our culture, but rather, in the words of writer Claudia Rankine, with the awareness that “[w]hiteness is the problem, and whites are the ones who need to fix themselves. So you sort of need to center them.”¹⁰

This book is based on over ten years of leading and co-leading The Bridge Project and over forty-five years of being a dancer. This book is not about virtue signaling or showing how “woke” I am. It’s the confessional archive of an ongoing learning curve, a reckoning with privilege, and a writing without an end. This is a book that wrestles with the question of how, to paraphrase white author Jess Row, awareness of white privilege might become a way of life, a way of making art, and a way of being in the world.¹¹ Being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.¹² Because my whiteness creates blind spots in my perspective, my understanding of these issues will always be incomplete.

This book is a collection of questions tangled up in the process of shifting white cultural power. Asking questions about power imbalances and inequality can feel destabilizing and scary. But asking these questions is urgent. Feminist scholars like Ruth Frankenberg have written about how uncomfortable it is for white women in particular to name inequality and power imbalances. Rather than face these issues directly, white women have historically tended “to evade by means of partial description, euphemism, and self-contradiction those [issues] that [make] the speaker feel bad.”¹³ Sharing and giving away power is messy and difficult. In today’s fraught call-out culture, it’s tempting to want to hide our shortcomings and vulnerabilities. I write from inside imperfection as a way to normalize the fallibility of anti-racist work. In this book, I fight the legacy of white women’s obfuscation of racial inequity by naming—in as direct, granular, and personal a way as possible—how these issues have played out in my relationships and work as an artist-curator.

In 2010, I started The Bridge Project as part of Hope Mohr Dance (HMD), the dance company that I founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2008. The Bridge Project is an interdisciplinary performing arts platform that approaches curating as a form of community organizing. I was motivated to start The Bridge Project by my desire to belong to a community of artists with a vibrant shared practice of critical thinking. I also wanted to experience artists’ work that I knew would never be presented by bigger venues in the Bay Area. I wanted to see that work, I wanted other people in the Bay Area to see it, and I wanted us all to talk about it. I wanted to provide a broader historical and cultural context for contemporary artmaking. I wanted to invite others to consider where the field of dance has been, and I wanted us to ask: Where next?

The Bridge Project is artist-led. Working artists run it. The artists whom we support co-create program content with us. The Bridge Project has no brick-and-mortar facility and thus no obligation to a parent venue or institution. One upside of having no real estate is flexibility: we’re able to partner with a wide variety of organizations and scale programs up or down in response to funding and artist needs. Another advantage of not having a building is that we have avoided the conflation of mission and venue that plagues so many arts organizations. The coronavirus has illuminated this risk: If an arts organization is forced to close their building, where does that leave their mission (and their budget)?

The downside of not having a building is that if we want to do a risky program, but we can’t get buy-in from a partner venue, the program likely won’t happen—we’re usually dependent on financial subsidies from partner institutions. Like all arts organizations, we’re constantly raising money to make programs possible.¹⁴ However, the shift to virtual programming during the COVID-19 pandemic has freed us from reliance on partner venues.

The Bridge Project has developed iteratively over time in response to changing cultural and political contexts. What began as a feminist platform for shared dance programming has evolved into a multidisciplinary, intersectional¹⁵ project with an explicit cultural and racial equity agenda. The program began with the intention of bridging the Bay Area and New York dance scenes. These early intentions have expanded to include building bridges between dance and other art forms and between artists and activists. In the past, audiences for my own choreography have been predominantly white. In contrast, audiences for The Bridge Project have been more diverse. As a result, The Bridge Project, as a social justice platform nested inside a white-founded dance company, bridges different audiences. The Bridge Project continues to shift as HMD transitions to a model of distributed leadership in order to implement equity values within the organization’s structure.

This book captures a window in time from 2010–2020. It also captures a place: the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bridge Project’s location in the Bay Area has allowed it more latitude to take experimental approaches to sacrosanct dance legacies than it if it were based in New York. In New York, the historical epicenter of dance power, dance artists and dance organizations work in the long shadow of Judson Church. Geographic distance from that postmodern legacy gives Bay Area artists a unique freedom to interrogate and disregard canon. In partnerships with The Bridge Project, both the Trisha Brown Dance Company (in 2016) and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (in 2019) for the first time allowed dances to be transmitted for the explicit purpose of inspiring new works by artists who hailed from disciplines other than dance. I don’t think these projects would have happened if we had proposed them in New York.

Rising economic inequality in the Bay Area and falling diversity in San Francisco inform everything that The Bridge Project does. As someone born in San Francisco in the early 1970s, I have witnessed how much diversity and culture the city has lost in the last fifty years. The city has a long history of activism and progressive politics.¹⁶ But this reputation is now in question. Tech wealth, multiple waves of gentrification, rising housing costs, and the corona-virus have led to an exodus of artists, lower-income, and working-class people. Income inequality has risen dramatically in the Bay Area in the last few decades.¹⁷ While the Bay Area as a region continues to become more diverse, San Francisco continues to get whiter.¹⁸ Gentrification has disproportionately affected artists of color and their communities.¹⁹

This is the context in which The Bridge Project approaches curating as a form of community organizing. A thorough discussion of the history and practices of community organizing outside the arts context is beyond the scope of this book. Community organizing can use a variety of strategies, including collaboration, consensus, conflict, and pressure to build relationships, facilitate leadership, and create or recreate institutions to effect social change. When I refer to curating as a form of community organizing, I am not referring to old-school leftist approaches to organizing in the United States that can be traced back to Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals, which take a pragmatic approach to building grassroots political power by harnessing the self-interest of different stakeholders.²⁰ I am referring to more recent transformative approaches to organizing that focus not merely on concrete, short-term, and external political goals, but also on intersectional ideology, on sustainable, long-term social movements, and on personal, interpersonal, and organizational change.²¹ When I frame curating as community organizing, I do so with the hope of imagining new models of relationship and support among artists and within arts organizations—models that transform our approach, rather than simply recast who holds power.

I also want to situate the work of shifting cultural power within the frame of “cultural strategy,” a field of practice that centers artists, storytellers, media makers, and cultural influencers as agents of social change.²² According to a report by Power California, cultural strategy takes a decolonial approach to culture. It aspires to transform “dominant cultural conditions” to become “conducive for all people to thrive and flourish.”²³ Cultural strategy “centers the ways historically marginalized communities have maintained and transmitted their values.”²⁴ The report lists three hallmarks of cultural strategy, with which I align curatorial practice:

– Deep engagement with artists and culture workers in envisioning and articulating a just future;

– Building and redistributing power for historically marginalized communities; and

– Creation of sustainable conditions for social change.²⁵

In positioning curating within conversations about social change, I also situate curating in the “artivist” tradition. I use the term artivism to refer to cultural work as an ethical commitment and a tool for social change. Terms synonymous with artivism include “Art for Change,”²⁶ “public practice,” “socially engaged art,” and “social practice.” Curating as community organizing means engaging on a daily basis with ongoing debates about artivism.

Artivism is not new. The term dates back at least to gatherings in the 1990s between Chicano artists from East Los Angeles and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, and was further popularized through actions and artworks of East LA artists and musicians and at community art centers in LA.²⁷ Artivism, as defined by Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre, signifies “work created by individuals who see an organic relationship between art and activism.”²⁸ Latorre writes that artivism “is both a strategy of survival and a necessary creative response to oppression.”²⁹

Artivism is often more about process than product. It is collaborative and participatory; the products of artivism often hold “equal or less importance to the collaborative act of creating them.”³⁰ Along with an emphasis on audience participation, artivism is often concerned with the ethical and the everyday. Practitioners “freely blur the lines among object making, performance, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism and investigative journalism, creating a deeply participatory art.”³¹ M. K. Asante describes the process: “the artivist merges commitment to freedom and justice with the pen, the lens, the brush, the voice, the body, and the imagination.”³²

Artists from historically marginalized communities often have no choice but to intertwine their politics with their art. Their art is saturated with history by necessity because there is no possibility of living otherwise.³³ As Augusto Boal, founder of Theater of the Oppressed in Brazil, said, “theater is political and politics is theater.”³⁴ In contrast, for many white artists, integrati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on Engaging with this Book
• Dedication
• Note from NCCAkron
• Foreword: Curating Oneself Out of the Room
• Prologue: What Does It Mean to Have a Radical Body?
• Chapter 1: Curating as Community Organizing: What it Means and Why it Matters
• Chapter 2: Shifting Cultural Power through Transparency, Artist Power, and Distributed Leadership
• Chapter 3: Creating an Artist Commons
• Chapter 4: Inviting Difficult Conversations
• Chapter 5: Facilitating Hybrid Forms
• Chapter 6: Expanding the Canon
• Chapter 7: Reckoning with Our Aesthetics
• Conclusion
• Grounding Politics in the Body: Prompts for Studio Practice
• The Bridge Project 2010–2020: An Annotated Archive
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Artists Cited