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HEADFIRST: Mohr, feet up, and
colleagues at the Trisha Brown Dance Company rehearse
Grooves and Countermove.
Jack Vartoogian |
in a large warehouse on
Manhattan’s West Side, Hope Mohr stands poised
at the dance barre in a T-shirt emblazoned with the
word “spirit.” The slender, delicate-featured
brunette swings one foot backward and forward, then
switches feet. Another dancer lies on her back stretching
a leg in the air; a third wiggles her hips on the floor.
It’s quiet but for the clanging of Mohr’s
wedding ring on the barre and the swish of her bare
feet sweeping across the floor.
At 4:30 p.m. sharp, Mohr joins other members of the
Trisha Brown Dance Company to practice Glacial Decoy,
one of the choreographer’s early pieces, performed
in silence. Artist Robert Rauschenberg is designing
costumes and set.
What’s remarkable isn’t so much that Mohr,
’94, is a member of the acclaimed dance company—although
that’s no minor accomplishment. Trisha Brown,
often called “the mother of postmodern dance,”
is recognized as one of the prominent choreographers
of the 20th century. It’s the way Mohr found her
way into the troupe that’s most unusual.
“It was kind of implausible to make it in New
York after my trajectory,” she says. A self-described
activist, Mohr majored in Latin American studies at
Stanford, then graduated from Columbia Law School. But
she was destined for stages rather than courtrooms.
When she was 5, Mohr saw The Nutcracker in
San Francisco. “From that moment on, all she talked
about was dancing,” says Nancy Mohr, her mother.
Mohr was accepted into the San Francisco Ballet School
a few years later—and yes, she danced in The
Nutcracker. On the Farm, she took modern dance
and wrote her thesis on domestic violence in Nicaragua.
After graduation she worked for Americorps and a human
rights group before enrolling in law school at UCLA.
After one semester, “this voice in me told me
I’m not done dancing, I should be dancing,”
Mohr says. So she took the next term off and went to
New York to “see what happens.” Once she’d
enrolled in several dance classes, she realized “this
is right; this is my path.”
Mohr transferred to Columbia, but fit law classes around
her dance schedule. In her final semester, she arranged
to arrive 15 minutes late for one seminar while she
auditioned for Trisha Brown. Mohr says she’d finish
auditions, jump into a cab and race to class. The tryouts
were grueling and lasted several months. “I worked
my ass off,” she says. “I felt like I was
on a mission, finally getting my life realigned with
my higher purpose.”
As it turned out, she excelled at both pursuits. In
one of her toughest classes, administrative law—filled
with law review members and other “gunner”
students, Mohr says—she got the highest grade
in the class, an A+. Then, in January 2002, came more
good news: out of 50 hopefuls, she was one of two hired
as apprentices for Trisha Brown’s company. Seven
months later, she became a full-fledged member.
Mohr says she’s a homebody but loves her life
as a dancer, on the road several months a year. Even
her honeymoon took a backseat to the performance schedule.
Mohr married Matt Zinn, an environmental lawyer in San
Francisco, last July. Two days later she was on a red-eye
to New York and flew on to Rome within 48 hours. Lately,
Mohr and her husband don’t see each other very
often. But the two were already accustomed to living
on opposite coasts.
Given her legal training, what does Mohr think about
as she’s hopping, drifting, ducking, swinging,
leaping, kicking and jumping across stage? “Ideally,
I’m not thinking. My mind is blank, I’m
letting my body do what it knows how to do—or
I’m thinking about mechanics,” such as weighting
the arms, Mohr replies. “That’s why I love
dancing so much. It’s liberation from thinking,”
she says. “I like living in my body,” she
adds. “That’s the thing about lawyers. They’re
disembodied heads. I don’t want to live like that.”
Now that Mohr has a full-time job dancing, she doesn’t
have to.
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