Reviews
NEW! Read Marcia Siegel's review of L'anima in the Boston Phoenix, dated 12/12/06, here.
Marjorie Morgan is one of the most eclectic and distinctive dancer/choreographers in town, with an experimental spirit tempered by a seasoned sense of craft. She's also a composer and singer, and she often infuses her quirky dances with spoken and sung text that explores the edges of narrative.
Karen Campbell, The Boston Globe
April 2006
The sounds start almost the minute that Marjorie Morgan, in a crisp pink-voile party dress, and Tom Plsek, in a white jacket and black pants, enter the black-box performance space at Mobius. Morgan exhales a mellifluous invented language including la-la-las, tweets, whistles, and tongue clicks. With his trombone, Plsek contributes drones, quacks, clankings, squawks, burblings, and melodies.Their eyes are locked. It's as if the two are connected by tones.
This is "Gu Decay and Reconstruction," the latest collaboration by movement-and-sound-hyperactivist Morgan and trombone explorer Plsek, who have been working together for nearly three years. The four-part series which resonates his almost incantatory song and movement takes you on a journey to the far side of sense.
Thea Singer, The Boston Sunday Globe
November 2002
Last night, the stellar Mobius Artist Group was augmented by the four resourceful dancers of Not Frida. Company members Alison Ball, Janet Slifka, and Jody Weber contributed 75 minutes of compelling movement based on structures by the group's artistic director, Marjorie Morgan. The result was a worthy homage to Cunningham that asserted its own voice. How could it have gone wrong? Clearly, these four women are among the most superb modern dancers in the city.
Theodore Bale, Boston Herald
April 2002
Whether she's offering dances from her own vast repertory, choreographing consciousness with Deborah Hay, or making collective pieces with her new company, Not Frida, Marjorie Morgan is without doubt one of the most prolific and original choreographers of the year (2001). Each of her performances during the past year was full of surprises.
Theodore Bale, Bay Windows
January 2002
New York has Meredith Monk, and San Francisco has Joe Goode. In Boston, we've got Marjorie Morgan. Like Goode and Monk, Morgan creates not only idiosyncratic, original choreography, but composes and performs the music and the poetic text that accompany her fascinating dances.
Theodore Bale, Bay Windows
February 2001
"Baggage," a performance collage program by Marjorie Morgan, presented at Boston's Mobius art center last month, was alive and astonishing, an avant-garde multi-media creation so integrated that the audience seemed to be thoroughly caught up in the experience of Morgan's whimsy of pratfalls and flights, melodies and dissonances.
Merrill Kaitz, North Shore News
December 2000
Massport gave Marjorie Morgan a helluva opening-night gift when she showed her newest danced and sung monologues at Mobius on Thursday. "Crash" is a surreal stream of consciousness from the mind of a freaked-out flight attendant well on the way to a pink slip. Who but Marjorie Morgan has recognized and managed to take such funny advantage of the precise, choreographed way a stewardess indicates the exit signs fore and aft, the balleticism of her prissy steps down the aisle? How could segue as gently from the interior of the cabin to the birdies flying into the blue? And if you want verisimilitude? You got it. As if on cue, air traffic control sent at least two planes roaring over the Mobius space at Fort Point Channel.
Which doesn't mean that Morgan is ever realistic. Her current program of solos at Mobius is a mini-retrospective, featuring some of the knock-your-eyes-out and break-your-heart works that she first premiered in the spring of 1996. This time, Morgan is less a bolt of new energy and more a young artist with a reputation to uphold.
Debra Cash, The Boston Globe
October 1999
Marjorie Morgan's evening at Mobius had six short solos that blended mime, stand-up comedy, and poetic satire with a dancer's total physicality. What's unique about Morgan's performance is the ease and quickness with which she calls on these skills. From the first, you can't tell whether she's dancing or talking or singing or all of those at once, so you just go along with her careering train of thought.
Marcia B. Seigel, The Boston Phoenix
December 1999