We talk about: scores for performance, weaving politics and abstraction, dance and visual art in conversation, revolutionary time, Ranu's painting process, the importance of sari fabric in her work, hybridity, installation "versus" performance, the fires in LA and much more…

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ranu Mukherjee makes hybrid work in painting, film installation and performance to expand imaginative capacities. Commissioned projects have been presented by Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles, de Young Museum, Karachi Biennale 2019, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Ballet, San Jose Museum of Art and Singapore Biennale 2022. Recent honors include an Artadia Award (2023), Pollock Krasner Grant (2020) and a Lucas Visual Arts fellowship (2019-2024). Gallery Wendi Norris published her first monograph, Shadowtime in 2021. Mukherjee is dean of the School of Film and Video at CalArts.

https://www.ranumukherjee.com/

@ranumukherjee

score for transitional times, The Moody Center for the Arts

float the mark, Mills Art Museum

Ensemble for Non-Linear Time, 836M Gallery/18th Street Arts Center

Hope Mohr/Ranu Mukherjee Collaborative Projects

Gallery Wendi Norris, Ranu Mukherjee: Shadowtime

Night Thicket (image of painting discussed)

Fanny Soderback, Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray

Jonathan Griffin, On Fire (Paper Monument) An oral history of the phenomenon of the studio fire.

RESOURCES FOR RESPONDING TO THE FIRES IN LA

LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund

Grief and Hope- Help LA's Artists and Art Workers Start Over

Mutual Aid LA

Altadena Girls

Free Art Fair LA

Studio Loan Project A project of the Contemporary Art League and The Artist's Contract providing tools for sharing short-term studio space in LA.

@thebodyisthebrain

"The way to strengthen our rights is to continually use them and demand that they be recognized." -- Annie Dorsen

We talk about: the Artist Open Letter to the NEA, resistance strategies, algorithmic theater, speechmaking as an embodied practice, and much more...

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Annie Dorsen is a MacArthur Fellowship awarded director and writer whose works explore the intersection of algorithmic art and live performance. Most recently, her piece Prometheus Firebringer was presented at Theater For a New Audience in Brooklyn. Other algorithmic theater projects have been widely presented in the US and internationally since 2010. She has written frequently about art and technology for leading performance journals and magazines. She is also a recent graduate of NYU Law School, where she focused on tech policy and civil rights.

https://anniedorsen.com/

Annie Dorsen, "The Dangers of AI Intoxication," American Theater, Aug. 30, 2023

NEA’s ⁠“Legal Requirements and Assurance of Compliance”⁠ (as of 2/25/25)

⁠Text of Artist Open Letter⁠

Hundreds of Artists Call on N.E.A. to Roll Back Trump’s Restrictions, N.Y. Times, Feb. 18, 2025

Text of Trump's Executive Order on "gender ideology"

Lawsuit challenging anti-trans Executive Order, lambdalegal.org

"The NEA's new diversity edits worry arts groups," N.Y. Times, Feb. 12, 2025

"Judge largely blocks Trump's Executive Orders ending federal support for DEI Programs," NPR, Feb. 21, 2025

‘Outrageous’ and ‘chilling’: Local orgs react to new DEI restrictions from the National Endowments for the Arts, MPR, February 19, 2025

@thebodyisthebrain

"At the core of nonstopping is a very political stance of each individual, maintaining, cultivating, nurturing, sustaining the agency of their attention." -Jeanine Durning

We talk about: the practice of "nonstopping," embracing not knowing as a generative state, going before we're ready, sustainability as an artist, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Pema Chodron, and much more….

ABOUT THE FEATURED ARTIST

Jeanine Durning is an Alpert Award winning choreographer and performer whose work has been described by The New Yorker as having both “the potential for philosophical revelation and theatrical disaster.” She has been investigating the mobilizing and mutable force of bodies and grappling with their conditions in time, space, and place for over 25 years through experiments in choreography, performance, practice-based research, teaching, and mentoring. Jeanine’s ongoing project,nonstopping, has been the foundation for her performance research since 2009, manifesting in many ways and contexts since. Jeanine has had the privilege to collaborate with several choreographers over the years, who have shaped her outlook on performance, including her mentor Deborah Hay, since 2005.

http://www.jeaninedurning.com/

@jeanine.i.dream

@thebodyisthebrain

REFERENCES/FURTHER READING

On Jeanine Durning'sLast Shelter for Candoco Dance Company

On Jeanine Durning's⁠Dogs of Devotion⁠

On Jeanine Durning's⁠dark matter, selfish portrait⁠ ( MANCC)

On Jeanine Durning's⁠inging andTo Being⁠ (Chocolate Factory)

Jeanine Durning,⁠nonstopping book

Eleanor Bauer,⁠ Workshop by Jeanine Durning⁠

Carl Phillips, Stamina

Deborah Hay, My Body, The Buddhist

Deborah Hay's website

Hope Mohr, Shedding a Split Self

Steve Paxton talking dance

Pema Chodron on groundlessness

"My weapon against destructive forces is creative forces." –Aejay Antonis Marquis

We talk about preparing to direct as an embodied practice, facilitating ensemble process, the politics of casting local, creating liberatory spaces for Black and queer bodies, Lorraine Hansberry, The Magnolia Ballet, and much more…

@thebodyisthebrain

ABOUT THE ARTIST

AeJay Antonis Marquis (They/Them) is a performance artist, scholar, educator, and activist committed to transforming theatre. A PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, their work explores Black and Queer cultural safety, decolonizing theatre, and queer political performance. Formerly the Director of Theatre at Contra Costa School of Performing Arts, AeJay’s Bay Area contributions include directing, choreographing, acting, and dramaturgy. They are directing The Magnolia Ballet at Shotgun Players this summer. AeJay also serves as an Artistic Associate at Marin Shakespeare Company, Artistic Producer at Playwrights Foundation, and Education Program Associate at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. They are also a proud GAAP Fellow.

RESOURCES/REFERENCES

Ticket link to The Magnolia Ballet at Shotgun Players (opens July 2025)

Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press (2003)

Grassroots Artists Advocacy Program (GAAP)

Episode 1: Pina, queering as a transitive verb, wrecking, drag as political practice, visibility …

A conversation with artists Eric Garcia and Chuck Wilt about their collaborative show, Beyond, “an evening-length production that reassembles Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring into an intergalactic, Queer extravaganza.”

ARTIST BIOS

Eric Garcia is a San Francisco-based devised dance-theater artist, drag queen, community organizer, and the Co-Director of Detour. He creates immersive and site-responsive performances that straddle nostalgia, radical futurism, collaborative ensembles, and queer maximalism. Eric is rooted in the drag and nightlife scene as Churro Nomi, and produces/hosts Clutch The Pearls, a drag cabaret on the first Sunday of every month at Make-Out Room in the Mission District. https://detour.productions/

Chuck Wilt is a choreographer, drag artist known as Fuchsia, educator, and the Artistic Director of San Francisco based UNA Productions. Chuck is currently on faculty at the LINES Training Program and has taught, created and set repertory for universities, training programs, professional companies, youth companies, public high schools, and professional dancers. Chuck’s work through UNA has been presented in San Francisco, NYC, Maryland, Colorado, San Diego, Massachusetts, Tokyo and Kaga Japan, Montreal, Vancouver and Rural BC. www.una.productions

RESOURCES

Susan Rethorst, A Choreographic Mind

TILT Shift Dance, On Wrecking

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

bell hooks, Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness

On Pina Bausch's Sacre (Rite of Spring)

Hope Mohr, Self and System

Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

Sarah Schulman Waxes Politic

Hope Mohr Websites:

https://www.hopemohr.org/

https://www.movementlaw.net/

Hi friends. I'm Hope Mohr, artist and advocate.

For decades I have woven artmaking and activism.

the body is the brain is a podcast about art and social change. Through conversations with artists and cultural workers, we explore the practice of contemporary artmaking.

The podcast extends my decades-long work as a community-based curator of live performance. My guests include artists I know and love. Our conversations are informed by my wide-ranging career, which has included dancing professionally, writing a book about activist curation, making multidisciplinary performance, and working as an arts attorney.

These conversations cover both the mysteries of the creative process and the realities of producing art today. They uplift artists as essential workers. One conversation at a time, we build an artist commons—a context for practice.

Tune in and be a part of the art.

https://www.hopemohr.org/