 All right. I think Chelsea were good, right? Which is why I'm here. You're good? Whoa. Hey, folks. I'm going to start. All right. Hey. Let's jump right on into it. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Chewing the Fat, part of the Infused Box with our talk session in conjunction with CultureBot.org. And we're also splitering through its new play. Yeah. Just through arena stage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're just through arena stage, through arena stage, and today we're going to be having Morganaka from Minneapolis, and in particular where I was just corrected. I said you're a coreographer and you said you're the main dancer and I was wondering, can you talk a little bit about the distinction between what you think about? Sure. It's not that, you know, intellectual. you know intellectual it's just the really the word choreographer sounds kind of removed in high articles and i like dance maker because it sounds more like i have my hands in it yeah choreographer sounds removed somehow yeah yeah and um so that's why i say dance maker the kind of work i like the sound of the work ethic because i my work i do very much have my hands in all the areas of the work tangible act cool so uh this is maybe you're you've been to fuse box with hijack yeah yeah which is great yeah uh can you tell us a little bit just about your background history relationship with dance making sure and then maybe also i'd love to hear a little bit more about the dance community of Minneapolis as well sure um i started making dances late in life and typically you think of dancers kind of owning their craft in the teen years and um i was very ambivalent about my career in art making and dance in particular um but i overcame that in my 30s and started making work and um really once once i got out of new york city uh sort of daunting place to live starting out as a choreographer when i moved to minneapolis like it was a much smaller town and they connected to the life of minded spirits like hijack arman christin people who really had a a back back then we didn't call it a DIY aesthetic but who really wanted to do art on their terms for people yeah and uh initially i was an eclectic with them and that's exactly what we did we made art we for example we made a piece that um we sat on a flatbed truck and we drove it around the state of minnesota and we took it to like corn days in austin minnesota and to uh harvest day in bluer and so how would you like get the word out or would you just show up roll out and like it was before the days of internet so we there was a collective of four people we split up territories within the state and we went to the chamber of commerce we were like we want to do a show here can we piggyback on a festival or something and like pull our truck up and have this built an audience and so that was really one of our first sort of um war rays out to the state and also uh one of our big projects to just really experiment with this idea of both in certainly of the permeable display of dance would people come out yeah people would come out we had all kinds of strange and wonderful reactions we went to grand marais which is like a port town and so it's kind of a resorty town it's near the the entry of the boundary waters is you know quintessentially cute and the community really came out and you know had food and with tail we had one of our contingency programs with tail tailgate parties people come out and have food and watch us sweat on the truck and we did in the middle of summer one of one of our performances was way west in the state i can't remember the name of town but it was the home coming um homecoming football opener and so we tagged team on the coattails of that particular event which was very strange because here these women dancing on the truck and mostly there are four young young high school football cheerleader titles which i love cheerleaders um and i love football too i love all sports but um i'm just saying it was not we were not aesthetically like like minded but that was the exciting part about it totally so now um as my work is involved i i still try i'm really concerned about how how people are connecting with the work and um i'm more um i'm curious about the theater as a the display units for the work and i'm trying to develop a an interactive relationship with something that's so for the audience and that that's what takes me into my current work which is about archaeology and visibility and um showing work and layers of visibility and and what is it to have um what does it mean when you have a partial view or a full view and um what does it mean when your experience is externalized in movement so um so that's so how much work have you done on this before you arrived in Austin so Morgan is here as part of a residency program we've done this in different shapes and forms so we're trying to sort of formalize it this year we're starting this series called machine shop and it's basically a series of short residencies where we offer artists space spacetime resources to to work on something um and it's pretty loosened it uh it wasn't sure how much work it did but prior to you I think well I had a residency last summer and part of that residency was identifying who I was going to work with and working one-on-one with them and I generated a lot of material and and just sort of had an intimate conversation about what this piece might be and through that I've developed kind of a lot of work a lot of material but um so you were developing that one-on-one with these people yeah so there are five six performance including myself we've all had a one-on-one experience either a couple of weeks in a residency Max and I made a duet in the fall um Hannah and I had a uh in Minneapolis residency together where we developed some material all of that is in there and it's created this sort of history for all of us I mean it's through I'm a conduit and um so one of the strategies for that was just to have this kind of um not only horizontal but kind of vertical feel uh would move us over to pull it out from our past within this um palette that's been created over time so we we I made a decision before I came here to kind of to focus on it to focus on particular sections that were kind of purpleated and I was like let's let's let's let's try to show something like this and something like this and something like this and see what happens the other thing that um that is and was um floating are some other kind of tangential or not tangential but important um design elements that are always sort of nascent to the dance like they're they're equal partners and often I'll think of oh I want to do this piece about visibility but it has to add an upholstered wall so we're making this upholstered wall that's part of the um the residency um experience not only figuring out how to build that figuring out is it a static object that is it interactive what um um it romantically is it a is it a creature is it um all these questions yeah yeah so that's one thing that you really can't do in this rental studio situation really be time and space for that so that's been beautiful we have another uh set piece that we're developing with mirrors and we'll have a little bit of that I'll probably further develop over the year as the place is premiered next year and the piece is going to premiere in France it is at eddy belts which is in belts for france yeah we got a residency at one of this um choreographic center for 19 of france to talk a little bit more about this sort of building of material with these individuals so how does that work do you have like a directive or like uh what are you using to sort of generate that material or focus it well um in this piece I kind of I started really broadly like I said there have been a lot of ideas that have come just come to the forefront of my imagination and I I put them in one big bracket and like all these things go together and part of the craft of the work is knowing that sometimes on the surface they really appear not to go together um so with christin for example we worked with images of reminding me because really interested in corporality and how how history physical history can come through the body the layers of the body particularly in the fact of the body which isn't meaning that I want to represent or or it's not a piece about fat people it's just a piece about knowing uh your own body and what rises to it and what's stored in it so um we use this external form of the climate new particularly in the 17th century strong together a lot of material that was evoked by our our um uh response to these images and um and then from there developed a lot of different kinds of material um it was fairly intuitive when I was working with her and um we I always respond to the space I'm in and I said this beautiful outdoor indoor outdoor kind of space in California and I was a son and sliding last door so there was a very um I don't know kind of feel to it yeah so anyway very intuitively and Karen came out too and I was with her for a month and we had a different kind of experience she generated a lot of material um based on her relationships uh to some physical forms of sports and um so that material was made there and it's in the piece pretty much got made and it's very much still in the shape that it that it got you know that it wasn't California which I'm really happy about she um performs it in a very amazing way it's very subtle but um very clear um uh what how's kind of how we developed work I was really curious about discovery for this piece this is like self-discovery when you feel this feeling of oh this is very mysterious like the whole kind of body-mind-centering phenomena very mysterious to think about like something is an emotional experience is connected to this side of my body but if you take that with the faith which you often have to do with dance there's lots of sort of mystery um faith involved in the work um I forgot where I was going with this talking about discovery discovery so you discover something about yourself that maybe there's something over here on this side of your body coming out so is this like discovery in real time in the space is that what you're talking about yeah in discovery in terms of research in in the in the room also discovery I want that to be met on both sides so we're using a process of personal discovery in the rehearsal space but I want the audience to feel like they have enough ability to really observe so that they can make a discovery so it's kind of sensate discovery I'm really interested in that state it's our surprise and and um wonder yeah and and it seems to hook what really well into or it's it's inspired by my interest in archaeology and how you know an object can reinvent the present because it tells you about something that happened in the past so I love that the power of that and I'm trying to figure out how to to review some of the movement with that kind of power through patterning very simply you know you see some an event that happened on stage and you see it later in different contexts you're okay now I it provides hindsight but also kind of shifts your notion of continuity so did I answer your question yeah totally I think I have another question sort of going back back back good let's go back you know you're talking about sort of entering the dance world a little bit later but what what actually sort of sucked you in or what pushed you into that or explain my question is what interests you about the art form well the dance and I have had this on again off again relationships as I was a child and I think part of what happened early on was that I was told that I couldn't dance because of my body type and the size of my body I've always been an athletic person and very coordinated and and very at home moving in a competitive slash cooperative physical situation yeah so I came and went came and went and finally I decided that um it was really a question of contentment in existence if I was going to feel like a complete human being then I had to keep doing this so it's it's an occupation of necessity and that's what I tell people it's not I mean I love it and it makes me stubborn and I keep at it and that's the only reason why I'm still working today is I just haven't given up I know so many people who you know after a while they're like this is too hard I'm going to become a body worker and I've certainly thought of those some kinds of things many times as staying in the world of physicality and sort of kinesthetic states but I um so it's a necessity or it's about you know living and communicating and so I'm still doing that yeah well can you talk a little bit about your collaboration with love sure and how that worked her her last piece heaven uh it's a really wonderful beautiful piece um the tour yeah killer yeah great great tour great tour but she was part of the project was collaborating with band low and you're familiar with low but they're a really awesome band they're really awesome they're kind of in the underground they haven't had a lot of pop success although robert plant just bought the rights to silver rider and he was nominated for an amoeba did not get it or whatever the music board is so they they are like leaning towards some some some symptoms of fame um but they're a minnesota you know icon people love them they're they're what you call the slow core john row which they don't like but i'm so too lazy to figure out a better way to describe that some critics wrote that you know shortly after one of the successful albums which means they like to work the edges of the songs they're they're ironic um they they kind of skirt rock and roll um stereotypes although every now and then alan who's the lead singer and main songwriter will you know go out with this boy band and rock it with retribution gospel fun yeah okay so yeah so um working with them was really interested they interesting they haven't collaborated with them since before and um i was really interested in them because of their vocal work yeah they have a lot of harmonics and um is just an amazing singer and alan is too and so they work again with the sort of light touch or what i call working on the edges with these vocal tones that kind of come in out of nowhere and then disappear so they generated um uh basically a sustained drum for like 30 minutes which they were generating live in the show with microphones and some free recorded loops and they would just there was a sense of building up and layering of choral material and it's a very it was it was a piece that was very much about space so um it seemed that um again we were up like a setting mind and um it was a good fit in terms of what he's interested in and she's interested in making their music and what i was interested back to get the piece and really for me it was a process of emptying out again like really wanting the audience to see what was going on um perhaps to the point where nothing was going on um where images were nearly static uh for long periods of time and that had some problems you know some people want to be inundated with um information and images and impulses and i um intentionally decided that i wanted to empty out and really make things simple and in that in that in that extreme restraint find freedom and i think alan works that way too um also alan's a religious man and so it appealed to him where he has religion it could appeal to him in his own um relationship with eity whatever that is like um and you know heaven was questioning that mostly from my vantage point it was about um why do we need churches to tell us what to do can i not generate my own value system that was one i mean there's many inquiries but that was one of many for me so um but the the collaboration was wonderful and um yeah so how did that play out like were they responding to pieces of series of movements or was it vice versa or both they responded a great deal to the to the movement initially when i went up to deluge talked to them i showed them the first chunk but again but i knew we were going to do this which is a walking processional and was it going to be a processional that allowed the audience to really see the the dancers and it was a very obvious metaphor of many religious practices many religious practices he's walking as a conduit to you know enlighten spiritual states and um it was my way of actually delineating and giving thanks to space because i feel like as the more i work the more i'm working with this intangible tangible space and how can i give materiality to something that is so um material yeah so that to me is my that's kind of a spaceholder festival even though it's much more um i feel like there's many more anchor many more narrative anchors in this piece than in heaven which was very very dry i'm still i'm still loving how i'll just dance give agency to to space and how instead of focusing on the body let's focus on what's right around the body um so alan was really into that and also alan is very physical so he was really drawn to the whole process of you know creating shaping and and moving yeah and yeah one of our beginning rehearsals we just did a lot of kind of scores about losing inhibition and being possessed by stakes that would rise they jumped in i think they also were very intuitively they do respond to they did do a lot of responding i'm hoping that alan's going to make the music for this next piece yeah we're in conversation and it will be more um i think it'll it won't be so much responding as i as me saying okay here are the ideas yeah can you can you go away and compose and then let's see how they align and then i want to respond to the music that he makes from his ideas yeah so i'm hoping it will be an ongoing relationship um and can you talk about any other sort of uh either influences or other artists that you're especially inspired by right now or interested in yes um i i just want to preface that by saying that i think thinking about originality in contemporary dance sort of referential being deferential referential originality and how originate the quest of originality is really brought the form down in a lot of ways um yeah well what i especially and more abstract work but there this tendency to want to innovate movement um in my opinion uh leads to over generating material and then you can see or feel what's going on and so my response early on the faker for example was to frame events with um a structure of metaphor but not with or a structure of narrative but without giving all the details so that there were and it's not an original approach but um just so there was some framing so that turned not only a dramaturgical order to the dancers because often you know in abstract dance we are forms which i look like cunningham i love but cunningham is um is another kind of genius that some of these contemporary choreographers i think probably want to be but are not they're not quite there so so i love the conundrum of i don't have to be original but how can i frame this so um i don't have to make up really cool steps but how can i frame this to um draw people in and really want to connect or um respond you know that maybe they maybe they reject it but um so wait what was your question initially i went on a tangent you were talking about uh influences for just people that you're interested in well um i would definitely say this is almost cliche at this point john cage still hugely relevant yeah usually relevant one of my favorite books is a year from monday i look at it often and i love the way how he says to remain in a state of not knowing and i think about that a lot in this work it's it feels very weird um and sometimes completely um irresponsible but um i've really tried to um live with that and they bolstered well as a good example of that because i felt it you know it was an image in my mind and i i still feel really committed to it but i had no idea how to make it what it would mean and um how it would influence the theater what problems it would it would it would create and what's and what opportunities it would create i just had the sense that it had to be built and um so i feel like i've done that a lot in my work and i've had a lot of success working that way um it's more intuitive um but uh i would have to say recently i saw a piece by sarah mitchison it's called devotion which was her sort of piece about being a creator i'm going to go out on limb and say that um i actually never asked her specifically and um what it was about and i doubt that she would even sit describe it that way right but um it was so interesting having done heaven to look at a work that was about reverence and dance and i know she's very very reverent um to many dance makers another recent um inspiration has been used in the child who worked with the filth glass her first collaboration with the composer was filth glass she was actually in eye style on the beach and that's where she met filth glass and they just did a remount of a 1979 piece called the dance i don't even know like it looked on the walker website so it was just that or something like dancing something really plain and just straight ahead and this is what it is and she scored the whole thing um with a sort of map um and you know the film apparently the story is that filth glass saw the map and was like oh i totally understand how you've interpreted those this is fantastic i let's go oh and soldawit made films of the dancers and so it was very controversial because the soldawit films are projected simultaneously to dance and so the images of the dancers in the film are huge and the real dancers are real and it was really controversial when it came out 79 people walked out so now it's it's a it's a piece that celebrates again essentialism which is kind of where i'm at even though again i think my work does have more narrative anchoring um i'm so into this idea of stripping down on what is this move where does it come from um i have a lot of ballet training that now as i get older and actually my alignment is getting better because i work on my body regularly not to take class but i do bodies and i do yoga and i i'm just engaged with my body more than i've ever had been the ballet is coming out of my body it's coming out and i don't know it's because it makes sense now that my body's really aligned um early on i've worked hard to refuse it to um when you say it's coming out it's like being um you can see it in my body in my stature in the choices i made it making it in the um what we thought it was more the way the shoulder and the head um you know get the these angles drilled into the ballerina and um so it comes out of my core and instead of pushing that away i'm using that reference to derivation to give my lips and tongue that i'm finding very interesting again and i'm also chopping things off like in ballet you would do these these funny hop preparations and before you do grand entrance and we're just doing the pop hop preparation like i'm making a a string of material out of something that would never just be isolated and framed alone in ballet so um again i it goes back to originality i i don't think that my moves are that original but i think again it's a way that i'm trying to see them and structure them that is bringing a perspective that i find interesting yeah to the to the form and um i i of course i want other people to find it interesting too i i also want to give room for ideas in my work you know it's not just about having an mysterious experience but like oh she's working with something specific you can talk about it and have an intellectual experience with it aside from kinesthetic all that jargon that we talk about in live performance which always sounds really boring to me to talk about yeah but but it's important let's face it oh hold on starvin's coffee i mean uh news box um so that's a lot of cases that's great i think that's one of my partner character she's a she's a movement genius she has a theater background was never a trained dancer the way i was and when we're problem solving and rehearsals she'll often just go i think what you should do is you know bring it around this corner and take it out here and i'm like oh my god so this whole notion that you're kind of a specified as a dancer and and your composition is coming up through you as we live on the stage it's so true and her instincts are quite refined and comfortable a totally different world so my collaborators have a huge influence other people christen working with christen also her sensibility her aesthetic is different than mine but um her sensibility on stage her knowledge of body and timing really really important christen christen and others max worst thing has been helping me develop a visual design for the show he's been he's a visual artist and dance maker and just like a fabulous smart man and he's been he's been he and i have been talking at length about uh not only the concept of the work but the all of the design knowledge coming together perfectly hopefully for the showing but in the future we're really using this as a stepping stone to let it you know make some mistakes let ideas fall down who knows let it be mysterious not know yeah of it yeah it's been really fun it's a great that we've had a blast it's been a lot of work but it's been fun yeah i was talking with uh phil sultanoff was one of our other artists the other day about uh and he's a big proponent of uselessness he had this whole sort of like i love manifesto about uselessness especially in making of work and i just really think that that's helpful or a nice idea it's great you know yeah it allows you to ask some very different sorts of questions and explore some things in a very different way instead of and i think it speaks to some sense this this idea that you're talking about a originality in this this desire to like be original and do something unique and like it it starts to kind of and you went in actually um one of our just asking us a simple sort of naive question in the space do you know absolutely one of the processes that we've been doing um i'll do something the dancers i'll say hey what's the essence of this and they'll do it no no i'll say you decide what the essence is and then take everything extra everything that's not useful and make that the phrase so go away and string those things together yeah and it's bizarre and really fun so we have we call them baskets okay so it's good one basket of non not useful moves from this from this day and then you have another basket and i often develop my work like here's this area this area this area and then i try to figure out that sort of core logic to bring them forward but it's been really fun and it's been quite broad i mean we've been all over the place with this piece so i that's why i didn't want to bring too much forward otherwise it could be an outdated situation um anyone have any questions i feel really solid about that yeah i know this is covered a lot of ground it's a good interview with my shout out you know is it yeah okay if i'm not talking let's get out this is i'm good you can do this all after a long time just pray we can slowly go from pancakes to liquor i'm very happy thank you it's really good to meet you and thanks for asking totally of course i'm thrilled about seeing seeing what you guys are playing around with yeah let's go ahead um in the south manna garden starting tomorrow tomorrow night we're doing a showing at seven there's one on saturday at seven and one on sunday at two two and um i might say that we do have a little bit of sound a lot of that was generated and also give give credit we're credit is thank you thank you