Research Residencies
Research Residencies are no longer offered
The Research Residencies at Stanford Arts support the relationship between art and research by providing artists of any discipline with the space and time to work on a nascent project, offering access to the intellectual and archival resources of Stanford University. Artists can meet with Stanford professors, dig into special collections, explore labs, write, and create. During their visit Stanford Arts offers the artists the opportunity to show their work in progress at the Bing Studio.
Previous Artists:
Hope Mohr
Stanford Arts Research Resident, choreographer and writer Hope Mohr will research the intersection of artmaking and ideology through the genre of artist manifestos.
- Performance: Stay: A Choreographic Response to Francis Bacon - 10/2/15
- Public Lecture: Hope Mohr Guest Lecture & Demonstration - 10/28/15
Master Class for Creative Thinkers
Friday, Oct 16 | 3 PM-6 PM
Location: AOERC 112
A studio workshop on the role of rules in collaborative creative process. We will write, improvise and compose together. How do we bring individual creative content into collaborative process? What are our unspoken rules of engagement? What happens when we articulate, disrupt or reject those rules? How can constraints take us deeper into our creative desires?
Master Class for Dancers
Tuesday, Oct 20 | 4:30 PM-6 PM
Location: AOERC 112
How can constraints take us deeper into our creative desires? Class will feature full-bodied technical dancing using vocabulary anchored in a set of physical rules. Students will have the chance to reflect on bigger questions related to the role of rules in dancemaking and composition.
Guidelines for all Master Classes:
- Open to Stanford students from all disciplines, who are open to creative physical expression.
- Classes are drop-in, not cumulative.
- Wear loose-fitting clothing and bring writing materials.
- Students must confirm they can attend the whole master class, from beginning to end, in order to secure a spot on the master class list.
- Space in the master class is limited to 30 students. A wait-list will be created once all of the open spaces have been filled.
To request a spot in one or both of these master classes, please contact:
Ashley Kennedy (kennedya@stanford.edu) by Thursday, October 8th.
Stanford Arts Research Resident, choreographer and writer Hope Mohr will research the intersection of artmaking and ideology through the genre of artist manifestos. Manifestos are future-oriented visions. Improvisation is creative thinking in the present. How do these two approaches to art intersect? What is the role of rules in the creative process? Can rules co-exist with intuitive ways of creating? How can we create productive constraints or scores for artmaking? This work continues Mohr’s ongoing interests in placing contemporary dance in historical and political context and in making work about the creative process itself.
Hope Mohr founded Hope Mohr Dance in 2007 after performing in the companies of a number of pioneers of modern dance, including Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and Margaret Jenkins. She trained at San Francisco Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York. While in New York, Mohr also performed with Liz Gerring, Douglas Dunn, Trajal Herrell, and Pat Catterson.
Mohr has enjoyed artist residencies at ODC Theater; Montalvo Arts Center; and Jennifer Monson’s Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance. She was named one of the YBCA 100 in 2015, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' annual nationwide compilation of artists posing important questions about contemporary culture. She was a two-time participant in Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange, a program of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, with mentor Dana Reitz (2014) and Molissa Fenley (2009). In 2015, she co-directed Anne Carson's Antigonick with Mark Jackson for Shotgun Players in Berkeley; in 2005 she assisted Lucinda Childs on Dr. Atomic for S.F. Opera. Mohr and poet Brenda Hillman were nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for their text for Mohr’s Far From Perfect (2010). Mohr’s article The Language of the Listening Body was published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. In 2015, she has a research residency at the Stanford Arts Institute.
Mohr has taught dance around the world, including at the London School of Contemporary Dance, P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, and the Trisha Brown Studio. Mohr studied theater at Yale and then transferred to Stanford, where she earned her B.A. in women’s studies. She earned a J.D. from Columbia while dancing professionally.
Since her 1994 choreographic debut in ODC’s Pilot 13, Mohr has presented her work throughout the country, including at the Alvin Ailey Center and Judson Church in New York, Velocity in Seattle, and The Mouth in Portland. Her work has been presented and/or commissioned by: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco International Arts Festival, West Wave Festival, Montalvo Arts Center, ODC Theater, Stanford University, Motion Pacific, Lines Ballet BFA Program, and the S.F. VA Hospital’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation.
Sources of institutional support for Mohr's work include San Francisco's Grants for the Arts, the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Lighting Artists in Dance/Dancers' Group and CA$H/Theatre Bay Area. HMD is currently a company in residence at ODC.
In keeping with HMD’s mission to not only create, but also to foster outstanding dance, HMD’s Bridge Project brings notable master teachers and choreographers to the Bay Area. Past and current Bridge Project artists include Deborah Hay, Jeanine Durning, Stephanie Skura, Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Liz Gerring, Dusan Tynek, Molissa Fenley, and Susan Rethorst.
Alyson Shotz
Alyson Shotz will be researching the visualization of waves, particle motion, the glacier movement, and crystalline structures and making sculptural studies based on this research.
At Stanford I will be meeting with scientists in various fields such as astrophysics, materials physics, oceanography and glaciology, in order to collect examples and understand how they visualize their work. I’m interested in the shape and behavior of various types of waves, the motion of subatomic particles, the contour and movement of glaciers, and crystalline structures. With that research I plan to make sculptural studies in the materials lab that may inspire further and larger scale sculptures later on. In addition, I’d like to meet with members of the Stanford Photonics Research Center and the Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics, to consider the aesthetics and possible solar applications for outdoor large scale sculpture. Lastly, I hope to do some research and testing of material properties of common objects: is it possible to compress something with significant materiality into something very small. How small? Conversely, how much can we stretch or pulverize an existing object and still sense the past history of that object. What energy or presence does this new object have? I hope to work with material scientists to test some of these conjectures.
Much of my practice is about trying to visualize invisible forces like gravity, space and light. For the past few years, I have been looking at these fundamental forces from various vantage points through the lens of my work. Space and light are two of the primary materials a sculptor can make use of, in addition to mass, volume and line. Questions about what the universe is made of or how it works are primary to what I believe sculpture should be about. At Stanford I look forward to the opportunity to exchange information with and learn from scientists in fields such as: astrophysics, materials physics, oceanography and glaciology. I’m often inspired by the graphic representations scientists use to explain or visualize their work. Collecting as many diverse examples of this kind of material is going to be a large part of my research. In addition, I’d like to work collaboratively on materials experimentation across a broad spectrum, towards the fabrication of future sculptural objects.
Alyson Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was recently included in the exhibitions The More Things Change, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemplating the Void and The Shapes of Space at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Light and Landscape, Storm King Art Center, Sculpture Biennial, Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden, and Living Color, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. She has had solo exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others. Shotz was a Stanford University Sterling visiting scholar in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology in 2012, she received a Pollock Krasner Award in 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, among others. In 2013, the School of Medicine at Stanford University commissioned a piece to honor former dean Philip Pizzo, MD. The sculpture, Three Fold, hangs from the ceiling of the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge.
Michael Friedman
Composer Michael Friedman will be researching the history of American popular music for his new musical American Pop, about the power of pop songs – why we write them, why we sing them, and where they come from.
When composer/lyricist Michael Friedman was commissioned to write a show about an important period in American History, he began to look at the sheet music he had inherited from his great-grandparents. American Pop is a show about popular music in the sheet music era. From 1846, the year Stephen Foster wrote O Susanna, to 1923, the year of Bessie Smith’s triumphant first record. From the beginning of music copyright to the end of public domain. It is about the power of pop songs. Why we write them, why we sing them, where they come from. When sheet music was distributed, and sold, and played in homes all over the country. And, inevitably, it is about the people who write popular music, and the people who perform it. And within this interrogation of the power of popular song in the sheet music era, Friedman explores his own inheritance, and the ways in which cultural appropriation seems to be inevitably an act of violence, and ways in which capitalism leads, inevitably, to people being paid to do things that are degrading or destructive. “A lot of these songs turn out to be more powerful, in a frightening, terrible way, than the people who wrote them or the people who performed them, and these songs destroyed people, even as they made money. People don’t transcend songs, it seems, try as they might. The songs survive.”
Michael Friedman has written music and lyrics for The Fortress of Solitude, which recently played at the Public Theater; Love’s Labour’s Lost and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (both with Alex Timbers); Here’s Hoover, Saved, The Brand New Kid, The Blue Demon, and, with The Civilians, for Canard Canard Goose, Gone Missing, Nobody’s Lunch, This Beautiful City, In the Footprint, The Great Immensity, as well as music for Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns (a post-electric play) and the company’s 2012 TED Talk. He is the co-author of Paris Commune (with Steve Cosson). He has been a MacDowell Fellow, a Princeton Hodder Fellow, a Meet The Composer Fellow, a Barron Visiting Professor at the Princeton Environmental Institute, and an artist-in-residence at Spring Workshop Hong Kong. He has written for the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. His recent TEDX talk, “The Song Makes a Space,” is available on YouTube. An evening of his songs was featured in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, and he received an OBIE Award for sustained achievement.
Michael Friedman’s visit is made possible by a gift from Ron and Cynthia Beck.
Paulina Borsook – My Life as a Ghost
To develop the performance/installation, My Life as a Ghost, Paulina Borsook will be researching the psychoneurological consequences of traumatic brain injuries, drawing from her own experiences and interviews with other individuals living with TBI.
Research
Interviews with TBI ghosts will lead to themes, gestures, metaphors, images, and phrases. Great lighting and feature-film quality will be integral to these interviews.Archival investigations through journals, diaries, and letters, as well as medical case-histories and texts, will hunt for traces of TBI ghosts.
Installation
The first and primary aspect of the project is a walk-through installation, evoking a circumnavigation of the internal perimeter of a cathedral. In this immersive mixed-media environment one locus might reflect the NFL-concussed while another might refer to bicycle flipovers. There will be approximately a dozen stopping points.A workstation will be set aside for TBI ghosts to describe their experiences, contributing a crowdsourced component.
Performance
Consonant with the rest of the project, an opening-night performance will evoke the ethereal, the ambiguous, and the haunted and will not be about emoting across a stage. The performance will involve a choreographer, theater technicians, and a composer/sound designer. It will be recorded and then run on a continuous loop in a corner of the exhibition space.
Film
The movie will combine interviews with philosophers, neuroscientists, theologians, and TBI ghosts. As with the rest of the project, the goal is to be suggestive and not didactic.
Documentation
A videoed fly-through of the installation will be made available online, as will the recording of the opening-night performance.A catalog will include stills from the installation and interviews, as well as essays from some of the same kinds of people as will be involved in the film. Included also would be the source document for the project, which will be read/presented at Stanford in October 2013.
In 1968 when I was 14 years old I shot in the head with a Colt .45 from a distance of six feet.In an act that was totally out of character, in 2012 I attended a support group for people with TBI — traumatic brain injury. A young man stood up — clearly from the military or law enforcement, a person totally different from me in temperament and experience — who said, “I don’t know why I am still here.”What came to mind instantly was “This is what I have felt ever since I was 14.” Three or four others in this group of maybe 20 other mildy-impaired also nodded their heads.
Something I had always considered existential or psychological or characterological turned out to be neurological.
A few months later the fully-formed vision for “My Life as a Ghost” arrived.
What happens when the soul is slammed out of the body and incompletely returns? What is the nature of this mechanically-induced variety of religious experience? How can we think about this peculiar intersection of body and soul, psyche and soma, in our era of functional MRIs and the Quantified Self?
I feel uniquely called to “My Life as a Ghost” because I have had to sort out on my own the subtler psychoneurological consequences of TBI. According to the medical science of the era of the 1960s, the assumption was that you were either dead, gibbering, or fine. I was none of these; instead I became a TBI ghost.
Because I am a writer, I know the limits of words. “My Life as a Ghost” will be a visual and immersive environment, with a choreographed and sound-designed performance opening night.
“My Life as a Ghost” can’t just be about me. Some of its foundational material will be obtained from interviews with other TBI ghosts.
“My Life as a Ghost” is art, and neither a documentary nor a literal-minded bestiary of TBI experience.
Paulina Borsook’s essays, journalism, and humor pieces have been published in venues such as The New York Times, Architectural Record, the website of Grace Cathedral, and Written By, the magazine of the WGA. Her first published short story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her novella Love Over the Wires was the first fiction published by Wired.
Author of Cyberselfish, she has orchestrated street theater and townhalls for an environmental nonprofit; produced and performed in works-in-progress events; and helped run a concert series.
She has a AB in psycholinguistics (philosophy minor) from UC-Berkeley and an MFA Columbia University.
Aaron Landsman – Perfect City
Perfect City will be a performance and installation about the formation and reformation of modern urban cities and the intersection between the planners and the inhabitants.
Supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation, a winter guest residency at Stanford University and ongoing research at ASU in Arizona, Perfect City will be completed in 2016, and will include a participatory performance, workshops, symposia, and a digital installation inspired by games like SimCity IV.Perfect City was inspired by a visit to London in 2012, during which I heard a representative of New York City’s long-term sustainability plan speak at a closed-door session to UK developers and administrators. What was implicit in this presentation was the fact that both cities are in the midst of an ongoing reformation in terms of how they operate, and whom they accommodate.
Like many 21st Century cities, both London and New York promote ideals like air quality control, walk- and bike-ability, green space, and access to fresh and locally sourced food and other goods. Both are leading the way for other cities in terms of new urban design and planning. Both are also becoming exclusive to all but the most affluent. What does it portend that the best things about city life are becoming unattainable?
In the first phase of this process, I will approach two specific groups of people: urban planning and design experts and theorists; and individuals who make their homes on the streets, specifically the young and itinerant. I want to find out from each what they think an ideal metropolis would look like, and I will facilitate conversations between these two groups on this question.
Phase two will be to arrive together at a common set of questions that could be posed to a broader cross-section of citizens. Ideally these questions will embody the tensions between the two groups mentioned above: Can a city be fair to all inhabitants? Where will the poor live, and what to the wealthy owe? How will we accommodate climate change, and whose neighborhoods will persevere? How does everyone get around? What challenges are intractable and which are surmountable?
Once we’ve assembled our questions for a broader public, I will facilitate representatives from both groups canvassing citizens in many everyday locations – workplaces, transit stations and other public spaces. I want this second phase of interviews to go on in iterations over a year, with public conversations and readings of their transcripts along the way. The goal here is to document the divergent kinds of responses that are given to the same line of inquiry, depending on who is asking.
The text gleaned from interviews will form the basis of the performance, which will be created with collaborators Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay, both of whom worked on City Council Meeting. I will also work with a game designer on creating an interactive environment – something like SimCityIV for urban philosophers – which will surround the performance and perhaps impact it, via viewer/participants’ decisions.
Perfect City is a performance and installation created in collaboration with experts in urban planning, and with individuals on the margins of cityscapes. Through conversations with both of these groups, followed by interviews with a cross section of residents where they live, work and commute, the project will try and offer a framework for an impossibly perfect place to live. A primary goal is to use the research process I’ve honed over the past ten years to illustrate two things: how our cities seem to be changing to reflect seemingly progressive values, yet are coming to exclude all but the wealthiest inhabitants; and how our responses to the same set of questions might change depending on who is doing the asking.
Perfect City continues the kind of research-based process that led to 2013’s City Council Meeting, which is being created and presented in four US cities. The new project also continues my obsessive interest in the way cities function (or don’t), in an individual’s agency in the face of various power structures (either governmental or private), and in the American myth of reinvention and its impact on cultures outside the US. But where City Council Meeting began with a sort of readymade form (the local government meeting) Perfect City will evolve on its own terms, with an outcome more thoroughly determined by the development process.
One of the things I have been able to do with City Council Meeting, as well as previous work, is to bring groups together who may not share a common view of a situation, and engender a conversation among them. For City Council Meeting we created a local ending in each presentation city, which brought political adversaries into collaboration on a 20-minute performance. In the cities where we have worked so far these included homeless young people, a maintenance worker, and the leader of a downtown business community; a council member and a middle-school student; high school students and education policy-makers. For Perfect City the goal is to give greater agency to our groups of experts, and allow the process to shape the project dramaturgically.
