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.
Leslie Talmadge, ’86, is a reporter for the Times Record in Brunswick, Maine.
