Since 2000, Morgan Thorson has generated a body of work that questions the conventions of western concert dance through interdisciplinary collaboration. Engaged in critical dialogue with the form, and inspired by a subject, physical process, or point of view, her work honors the body as a complex means of expression as it relates to the site and community in which it is situated. For Morgan, dancing provides communication and connection to people, silence, rage, space, beauty, and itinerant imagination.
Some of Morgan’s accolades include a 2016 Doris Duke Performing Arts Award and a 2024 Commission from Great Northern Festival. She is also a Guggenheim (2010) and USA Artist Fellow (2011); and in 2021 exhibited Group Choreography at SIM Gallery in Reykjavík, Iceland. Morgan is currently developing a new performance installation entitled Sundowner.
While at MacDowell in 2012 she researched movement as notation for her performance work, Journeyman. This project was supported by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts. In 2018, she developed materials and practices for her performance work Public Love, a commission installed at the Walker Art Center.
During her 2022 MacDowell Fellowship, Thorson made field recordings of sonic nightscapes, engaged in nightly outdoor movement practice, created solo choreography prompts rendered in pencil drawings and photographs, and generated scores and prompts for group night dancing. These research materials and methodologies will be used to create a new performance and visual art work, Untitled Night / Solnedgång, for the Great Northern Festival in 2024.
