Dancing in choreographer Morgan Thorson’s latest project is more than a little like running a marathon. In the summer of 2015, Thorson created Still Life, a five-hour, live installation dance at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. Nineteen dancers took turns performing in a public gallery space four days a week for three months. “I unconsciously seek extreme physical states,” says Thorson. “That’s fueled my choreography—to create situations that create those extreme states.” It all makes sense when you consider her background: the discipline of serious ballet study mixed with the competition and rigor of sports (she played lacrosse and did swimming and diving), and a healthy dose of New York downtown dance thrown in for good measure. This month, she’ll resurrect Still Life—with a couple of new twists—at the American Dance Institute’s 160-seat theater in Rockville, Maryland.
Performance: Danced with Jennifer Monson and Ann Carlson
Choreography: Began creating dance projects in 2000; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2010; Doris Duke Award, 2016
Teaching: Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University; certified practitioner of Skinner Releasing Technique
This Still Life “For the Weisman, I developed this dance cycle that could be repeated but would decay over time because of the dancers’ endurance. In this version, I’m focused on having the dancers think more aggressively about killing the dance. What happens to the dancers when they’re possessed to kill the dance? When the material is gone? It requires a different kind of presence—it puts a lot in their hands. We also have these spontaneous cuing systems as another new layer. The dancers know the signifiers, but they don’t know how I’ll use them or pass them around. What happens when you don’t know what’s going to happen? I’m curious how we’ll communicate within something that’s falling apart and still keep the composition actively growing in the moment.”
The audience’s role “The audience could come and go and participate in a variety of ways. They could come and seek some sort of contemplation. They could come and rest. They could come and watch the movement. They could come and watch us rehearse—at the beginning of each installation, we would have a half-hour of rehearsal.”
The hardest part of dancing a five-hour piece “There’s this discipline: Sometimes the galleries were empty—no one was there—so it was really about the dancers having a relationship with this dance cycle when there’s no one to project to. That was an interesting puzzle for the dancers. I was the stage manager, and even I would leave sometimes, so that they could really be alone with the dance.”
