Morgan Thorson: Untitled Night
Jan 27, 2024
Silver Lake
Tickets: $15
Untitled Night by Morgan Thorson is an outdoor nocturnal dance event that will take place on the frozen Silver Lake. Made for extreme climates, Untitled Night draws inspiration from night skies and the dynamic winter of the Upper Midwest, inviting audiences to immerse into the temperament of winter and bask in the dark cover of night. Featuring a collaborative body of interdisciplinary artists and instigated by research in queer ecology and dark sky advocacy, Untitled Night is a necessary, ever-evolving, multisensory partnership with stars, trees, land, ice, and creatures. This one-of-a-kind, #onlyinMN performance, audio-described by the performers, will also include illumination and electronic playback as creative accommodations. With choreography that mediates advocacy and bereavement for winter nights, Untitled Night will provoke consideration of the effects of light pollution and the climate crisis on the natural world.
Untitled Night is commissioned by The Great Northern with additional support from Red Eye Theater and MOVO Space. Untitled Night is also made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation; and is a fiscal year 2022 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and an Arts Impact for Groups Grant. In addition, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
Project Credits:
Dancemaker, Director & Performer: Morgan Thorson
Audio Description Creator & Director: Jay Afrisando
Collaborators/Performers: Sam Aros-Mitchell, Alexandra Beaumont, Dienae Hunter, José Luis, Eva Mohn, Margaret Ogas, Arwen Wilder, Taja Will
Costumes/Apparel: Dakota Blankenship & Kristen McCoy
Lighting: Nao Nagai
Musician (Trumpet): Hollyn Fellows and Mike Valois
Project Manager: Garrett Obycki
About the Artists
Morgan Thorson interrogates western concert dance, and how to dance her white body through creative collaborations, site work, and embodied anti-racist discernment. For Morgan, dancing provides connection to people, land, rage, and itinerant imagination. She mixes deep house and club music as DJ vinyl-lite.
Jay Afrisando created and directed Audio Descriptions for Untitled Night. He is an Indonesian award-winning multimedia artist, composer, researcher, and educator working on aural diversity, acoustic ecology, and cultural identity through multisensory and antidisciplinary practices.
Sam Aros-Mitchell (he/him/his) is an enrolled member of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. As an art-maker, dancer, and scholar, his work spans the disciplines of performance, sound/light/scenic design, choreography, and embodied writing. www.samarosmitchell.com
Alexandra Beaumont, an Afro-Caribbean textile artist and dancer, works in fabric and movement to explore personal and collective joy, celebration, and expansion. Her banners reference the kinetic, and metaphoric elements of parades, through collaged cloth portraits of celebrants in movement. www.alexandrabeaumont.com
Dakota Blankenship has a decade of experience working backstage creating costumes, styling wigs, and managing quick changes. Since settling in Minneapolis in 2017, they have worked with numerous theaters and dance companies both in and outside the Twin Cities. They are a current member of Pillsbury House’s Naked Stages program. Their passion for somatic health has led them to study energetic bodywork and open their own healing practice.
Starting at the age of 11, Hollyn Fellows chose to play trumpet in her middle school band after attending a Minnesota Orchestra concert. She has never once regretted that decision and has never played another instrument. Hollyn is a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, where she received her Bachelors of Music in Trumpet performance. At the University of Minnesota, she studied with Marissa Benedict. She is currently studying privately with Brad Shermock. As a freelance, classical, musician, she can regularly be found playing with different orchestras around the Twin Cities and her brass quintet, Uufda Brass, and Lady Band Chamber Winds.
José A. Luis, born in Minatitlán, Veracruz, Mexico, lives in Minneapolis. A queer-bilingual- immigrant-choreographer/dancer, he navigates the complexities of the self/identity in relation to space, time, and the people in our lives. The boundaries we come across are present and blurred as he aims to understand the balance of "knowness" and "possibilities". For more: www.jose.dance
Kristen McCoy, owner of RETHINK Tailoring in South Minneapolis, is equal parts upcycler, designer, professional tailor, mender, and problem solver. With the mission to keep as much out of the landfills as possible, she creates wearable art (both costumes and ready-to-wear clothing) from upcycled damaged clothing, secondhand apparel and deadstock fabrics collected from the community. Kristen has been upcycling for over 25 years and mending professionally for clients for 15 years.
Eva Mohn is a dancer, composer, performing artist, and seasonal farmer based in Minneapolis and Stockholm, Sweden. She has worked between the US and Europe since 2009 and joined Cullberg in 2012.
Nao Nagai is a queer Japanese performer and creative in theater arts, lighting design, and dance. She teaches at Goldsmiths and tours her projects world-wide.
Margaret Ogas (she/her) is a choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in the Twin Cities. Using an interdisciplinary approach rooted in dance and informed by Chicana cultural sensibilities, her works tell surreal everyday stories through a collage of movement, text and sound. Margaret is a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.
Michael Valois is a young Twin-Cities based performer, soloist, and lead player currently studying at the University of Minnesota pursing a degree in Trumpet Performance as well as Computer Science. His musical career has been varied, having played pit for musicals such as Shrek the Musical, SpongeBob the Musical, the Mystery of Edwin Drood; recording for Jack Stamp and Dean Sorensen; as well as performing Sinatra with Darius Rucker. Winning various concerto competitions, Michael has performed the Hummel and Aritonian Trumpet Concertos as well as Arban's Fantasie Brilliante as a soloist with the MacPhail Chamber Ensemble, UMN Symphonic Band, and Roseville Area High School Symphonic Band. His major teachers include Pat Moriarty, Matt Dehnel, Josh Cameron, and he is currently studying with Marissa Benedict and freelancing in the Twin-Cities area playing jazz, classical, theatrical, and sacramental music.
Arwen Wilder does most of her choreographic and dance exploration with Kristin Van Loon as the 30 year collaboration HIJACK. Arwen has danced with Morgan Thorson on and off since 1994. Other projects include: parenting two children, keeping Barebones (a community puppet theater) running, teaching dance composition, Contact Improvisation and Pilates, practicing Cranial Sacral Therapy and holding onto an old-fashioned belief in Irony.
Taja Will is a queer, Latinx (Chilean) adoptee, performer, choreographer, somatic therapist and Healing Justice practitioner based in Minneapolis. Taja’s aesthetic is one of spontaneity, sonic/kinetic partnership, and moving in relationship to risk and intimacy.
A very special thanks to Untitled Night's early creative collaborators/performers/makers Eva Mohn, José Luis, Nao Nagai and Taja Will; also, so much gratitude to those who joined the project as the seasons changed and we moved through those changes: Jay Afrisando, Alex Beaumont, Sam Mitchell, Arwen Wilder, Margaret Ogas and Dienae Hunter–thanks for putting the S back in Sparkle and Spunky and thank you for your creativity and generosity. Unwavering gratitude to supporters and heavy lifters David Donovan, Alyssa Baguss, Garrett Obycki, Ian, Nao, and Rich and all the folx at Silverwood; and thank you to TGN, especially, Kate Nordstrum and Jasa McKenzie. Another thanks to José for dancing in thigh high snow in Idaho, to Tara for image making and processing and emotional support, and to Eva for the unforgettable ski around Silver Lake, for the quiet walking and talking before we even started, and the outdoor space at the farm for research. Thank you Claire, Mary and Ophelia for your thinking and dancing research, and to Lisa and Katie who bailed me out of a panic; and Amanda Cooper for such amazingly sage advice on all things business and contractual. Thank you to my beloved local family Austin, Button, Eleanor, Georgia, Kaz, Mabel, Malcolm, Petey, Rosy, and Valerie and also far-a-field family, Penny, Petr, Casey, Jessica, John, Karen, Sara, Stefano, Tara, Jon, Victoria, Ellie, Shayna and Samiya, and thanks to the Silver Lake neighbors for participating in the LIGHTS OUT ACTION and to you for holding dark winter nights dearly.
