Momentum 2005: Jennifer Hart/Morgan Thorson

Jennifer Hart: The Station and Song

In an increasingly fragmented culture, human interactions are often lost to the anonymous ease of modern technology and the widening of perceived differences between personal philosophies. Hart’s modern ballet uses the American train station—a symbol of railways that once brought the country together physically and psychically—to expand our notions of time and space and recapture the optimism of a country moving toward a shared, albeit unknowable future.

Morgan Thorson: Faker

Who is more dead and alive than Elvis Presley? What sustains his memory postmortem? Thorson’s exploration of impersonation, obsession, and ritualistic behaviors throws open the doors to our culture’s backward fixation with both the mystique of celebrity and the desire for authenticity. Twin narratives—a King impersonator with identity issues and an obsessive-compulsive searching for a reprieve—blur the lines between behavior and dance, body and image. Faker is a disjointed world of posture, attitude, story, and song.

Walker Commission