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Sima: A shift from second to third wave feminism. Hope: I wore two hats for a long time: an activist out- side the dance world and an activist inside the dance world. Within the dance world, my curating had been tied up in my own aesthetic lineage, which is white postmodernism. So when I started curating, I was bringing in people like Anna Halprin, Sim- one Forti, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown—all white women. All of the chore- ographers I’ve ever danced for professionally have been white. As an activist outside the dance world, my awareness and engage- ment was much more inter- sectional. I was a Latin American Studies major, I did fieldwork in the domes- tic violence movement in
of collaborative leadership within non-profit spaces. Maybe it’s not acknowledged as such. Sima: I’m always a little leery of the word col- laborative because, yes, it means we work together but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we do so in a non-hierarchical way. Does part of announcing a shift to distributed leadership mean claiming a non-hierarchical relationship between the organization’s moving parts? Karla: Yes. There is that desire among the staff and also with the artists to figure out ways to flatten the hierarchy between all of us when we’re working together. What I’ve observed in the move to distributed leader- ship is that it’s tied to these macro questions that people have had in the dance community around how sustainable it is to run an orga- nization, to put on a dance concert, to make work using the models and paradigms that have been prevalent for however many years. In part it’s a conscious effort to counter exist- ing patterns of how we do things, the way that we fundraise, the way that we put excess value on production driven work. Karla: My work is changing a lot because I have to change the way that I see it. Even though I felt that my contributions were acknowledged and respected, I was not hired to vision for the program. I’ve been thinking a lot about what that shift means because it seems like an easy shift, but it’s not. In par- ticular, if I’m part of something I respect already, I’m inclined to support it in the way that it exists. Sima: How has your role in the organization changed since the shift? Sima: To suddenly become part of not just promoting but creating the vision. Karla: Yes, that’s a very different thing even if you’ve already had a lot of autonomy in terms of the work that you were doing in the organization. Cherie: A year ago I came on as HMD’s Community Engagement coordinator. I was mainly working with the Community Engagement Residency (CER) program, which I was really excited about because of its focus on cultural equity and working with artists. I’ve done a lot of work in equity in dance education. But I was interested in what Sima: What’s your relationship to HMD, Cherie?
(Left to right): Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, Karla Quintero
with Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr & Karla Quintero TO MOVE FORWARD STEPPING BACK
Hope: The Bridge Project’s programs have been social justice-driven for a long time. More recently, that engine has become more focused on cultural and racial equity, most specifically with Dancing Around Race (2017-2018). Through that project, I was in a lot of working and personal relationships with artists of color and involved in conver- sations where I was frequently hearing the need for white people to step back. I started thinking about what that would mean for me personally and what that would mean to apply that to the organization that I founded. I also felt like there was an increasing discon- nect between our public facing programming and our internal organizational structures. I wanted to bring the internal structures into alignment with those values. Sima: What did the social justice drive of the organization look like before Dancing Around Race? Hope: The program was anchored originally in feminism and a commitment on my part to honoring and centering female-identified voices and lineage in dance. Over time that curatorial commitment became more intersectional.
Central America. I had that awareness, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to implement it into curating. Sima: When did you, Karla, come into the organization? Karla: My first engagement with HMD was as a dancer in the 2016 Bridge Project , Ten Artists Respond to Locus (a multi-dis- ciplinary response to the legacy of Trisha Brown). I started working as a dancer in Hope’s work in 2017 and then as an admin person later that year. Sima: I’ve seen you in a lot of different admin spaces. And dance stages. Karla: Yeah, I do a lot of different support roles for folks in the non-profit space. Before danc- ing, I used to work in transportation advocacy in New York, particularly in Spanish-speaking communities. I started working with HMD as an admin manager, mostly helping Hope carry out the programming in whatever way was helpful. It may not have been distributed lead- ership, but a lot of the work was collaborative. It’s interesting that “distributed leadership” is a buzzword now because there’s always a lot
by SIMA BELMAR
B eginning on September 13 and running through November 21, HMD’s 2020 Bridge Project pres- ents POWER SHIFT: Improvisa- tion, Activism, and Community , a festival that features the improvisational practices and diverse dance genres of leading Black/African American, Latinx/Latin Ameri- can, Asian American, female-identifying, and queer improvisers and social justice activists from around the world. In a swift pivot to online and outdoor platforms, the festival
organizers will offer art and activism work- shops, improvisation practices for both rookies and old hands, and live-streamed performances. HMD stands for Hope Mohr Dance, and The Bridge Project has been Mohr’s curato- rial platform for ten years. But this spring, the organization announced a shift to a “dis- tributed leadership” model, which might mean that Hope Mohr Dance goes the way of the Oberlin Dance Collective–from words to acronym.
HMD’s leadership is now composed of three co-directors: Mohr, Cherie Hill, and Karla Quintero. Quintero is HMD’s Director of Mar- keting and Development, and Hill is Director of Art in Community. Titles aside, the three women now work as a co-curatorial team. I spoke with them in July about what the shift to distributed leadership looks like in practice. Sima: What led to the shift to a distributed leadership model? And what is distributed leadership?
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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