Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance

By Hope Mohr

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1629221171
• ISBN13: 9781629221175
• Release Date: September 2021
• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Length: 134 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"