Biography
Still from Mum, I’m in the fourth dimension, see! at Yorkshire Dance
by Es Morgan, Image by Rhiannone Stone.
Contact: hello@esmorgan.com
Frances Morgan (she/her) is an artist, performer, facilitator and producer from East Yorkshire whose practices draw from diverse interests in dance, live art and writing. She creates performances as containers for language and movement, which co-exist on their own terms, without hierarchy or resolution. Made for theatres, clubs, galleries, and film, these works emerge in response to an array of interests: queer and post-work futures, poetry, improvisation, tarot, and leftist politics; funnelled through her shifting experiences of transness, intimacy, desire and longing.
to feel something tipping, under and towards you is her recent film work made in collaboration with filmmaker Eleanor Sikorski, co-commissioned by Wellcome Collection & The Place, and exhibited for two weeks online in July 2021. The continuously looping film charts a cyclical experience of emergence and disappearance, of breathing, of being with others and being alone. It weaves together fleshy, textured poetry and movement, exploring visibility, dormancy, and trans embodiment.
Mum, I’m in the fourth dimension, see! is her full-length theatre work made in collaboration with dramaturg, Charlie Ashwell. Through relentless, associative poetry and dancing the work channels the ambient anxieties and tensions of living in contemporary UK. This has been performed at The Place, Yorkshire Dance, The Yard Theatre, and The Marlborough Theatre. Previous works have been performed at a range of venues including Assembly Point Gallery; Vivid Projects, Birmingham; Trans Pride Brighton; The Wardrobe, Bristol; La Fete du Slip, Switzerland; and tanzhaus nrw, Germany.
Collaboration is at the heart of Frances’ practice, and she has co-led participatory, curatorial and discursive projects in collaboration with artists such as Charlie Ashwell, Eleanor Sikorski, and Sara Sassanelli, responding to overlapping themes within their work: androgyny, queer nightlife, tarot, magic, monstrousness and post-work futures. In 2019 Charlie Ashwell and Frances released hereafter, a publication collecting texts by six artists, creating space for radical speculation and reimagining of the future. Frances also co-curated club/performance project, move close, which brings together dancing, experimental electronic music, and unannounced queer performances from artists working across dance and performance art.
Frances works part-time with her Chisenhale Dance Space’s Artist Community asa producer and facilitator. Her role has recently focussed on developing artist leadership at the organisation, experimenting with ethical selection processes, and advocating for marginalised artists. She is currently studying an MA in psychodynamic psychotherapy at Goldsmiths Unmiversity.
A whip-smart, existential oddity of a work. Mum! is touching
and politically potent, part poetic fantasy, part surreal drag-rant.
Es Morgan is a strikingly original voice.
Orrow Bell, dance artist and Artist Development Manager at The Place
Writing about Mum, I’m in the fourth dimension, see!