David Thomson and his collaborators, Katie Workum, Jaguar Mary X, Nehemoyia Young and Katrina Reid, will be here working through the final development and preparation of the production VESSEL, which is premiering this October at the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York City. This visiting artist engagement also provides members of the Colby College community with an opportunity to experience work in progress and meet the artists.

VESSEL is the latest development of Thomson’s research on the perception of identity, extending to questions on how presence and absence operate within the human experience.

In this durational installation the performers are visually obscured by a thin membrane of material. Through a practice developed within this project, they enter into journeys of transformation and forms of trance. The audience is there to witness, listen and feel.

Thomson, an interdisciplinary artist whose practice borders on choreographic situations and installations centered around questions of identity, unconscious narratives, and the expression of presence and absence as performative states, visited Colby in March to present a pair of workshops for students, faculty, and staff on how to reconceptualize care within work ecosystems.

David Thomson Returns for an Intensive Residency