Margaret in Motion
"I was introduced to a form of magic. I had never seen a dance before, and I thought, wow! these people are floating and flying. I didn't know what 'postmodern dance' meant, but I wanted to be a postmodern dancer."
By Lucia Mauro / Photography by Erika Dufour ('97)
Many little girls dream of becoming ballerinas. But tutus and tights didn’t impress Margaret Morris (B.F.A. Dance Choreography, ’05) when she joined her cousin in ballet class on Chicago’s South Shore. Seven years old at the time, she opted for the tumbling class, where she could wear shorts and t-shirts. Then a fall drove her away from the dance studio altogether, until Nana Shineflug’s Chicago Moving Company gave a performance at Morris’s elementary school.
She was also struck by Columbia alum Shineflug’s (’85) unconventional partnering: women lifting men; women engaged in athletic or deeply personal duets. Although she was attracted to postmodern movement, Morris chose to major in a different area of the performing arts—classical voice—which she had studied as a teenager at the tuition-free Merit School of Music, and then at Illinois Wesleyan University before transferring to Columbia College Chicago. After taking a dance class at Columbia, however, she was hooked, and enrolled in the dance program.
Morris devoured her fundamentals, composition, contact improv, and dance-writing classes. And she took advantage of every student choreography opportunity. She entered her work in the American College Dance Festival throughout her time at Columbia, and two of her psychological works—Diptych (addressing the splintered aspects of schizophrenia) and To Faith and Circumstance Resigned (structured improvisation questioning one’s purpose in life)—were selected to perform at the national festival. She graduated in 2005 and was recently awarded a prestigious $15,000 Chicago Dancemakers Forum grant—generally awarded to mid-career artists—and she’s only been dancing six years.
This past spring, Morris, 25, completed a six-month LinkUp Residency at Links Hall, an intimate, experimental performance space in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood that fosters young choreographers. Her quartet, In Tongues, debuted there. The piece is a perfect example of her interest in dance’s “capacity for healing.” As if being touched by the Holy Spirit, each dancer gradually becomes consumed by ecstatic tremors. Torsos constrict along the spine, then release, giving the sense that an invisible force is passing through the body. In performance, Morris hopes to give audiences a transcendent experience: “to open up those little chambers in a person and allow them to think about what makes life meaningful.” She continues her exploration of spirituality and contemplative practice in a new full-length piece, Laying of Hands, scheduled to premiere in spring 2007.
The dancer-choreographer seems to have an innate connection to the supernatural world. One evening, before transferring to Columbia, she was practicing alone in the chapel at Illinois Wesleyan when a storm broke out. As she held a high note, bright lightning flashes and a loud thunder clap added to the drama. This near-mythic moment of clarity tapped into her buried desire to make dances. “I realized I wanted to be making work, but I’m not a composer,” recalls Morris, who evokes a serene dynamism in person. “I wanted to be a choreographer. Maybe someday I would combine dance and voice. But my feeling was, I gotta go learn to dance now.”
As if speaking through the storm’s energy, Shineflug came to Morris’s mind. So she sought out the established holistic choreographer at the Chicago Moving Company’s base in Hamlin Park. Shineflug, on faculty in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Theater departments at Columbia, taught her about finding her chakras and energy. Dance for Morris became a journey of internal discovery, not a series of prescribed steps:
“Through movement, everything synthesizes in this amazing way. I feel connected to an intelligent power that’s bigger than me but also a part of me. It’s magic.”
Lucia Mauro is a dance critic and arts writer whose work appears in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago magazine, and on Chicago Public Radio’s “848.” She also hosts the monthly “About Dance” program at the Chicago Cultural Center. Erika Dufour (’97) earned a B.A. in Photography at Columbia. In addition to her fine-art photography, she maintains a commercial photography business in Chicago.
