David Thomson is an interdisciplinary collaborative artist whose history has encompassed the fields of music, dance, theater and performance with a wide range of artists including Bebe Miller, Jane Comfort, Trisha Brown, Grisha Coleman|Hot Mouth, Sekou Sundiata, Ralph Lemon, Meg Stuart, Deborah Hay, Alain Buffard, Maria Hassabi, Yanira Castro, Marina Abramović, Kaneza Schaal, David Bowie, Lee Mingwei/Bill T Jones, Yvonne Rainer, Okwui Okpokwasili and Carl Hancock Rux among many others.

His current practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity, creating performance installations in a range of temporal forms from short works to durational tasks, that sabotage assumptions to provoke reimagining.

David’s upcoming project VESSEL is a durational performance installation that subverts the deeply habitual act of visual interpretation to allow space for an alternative presence in which the body is the primal source of transformation. By reconfiguring the traditional relationship of performer and audience, VESSEL offers to let the body listen in ways it has forgotten. The work is conceived and directed by David and brings together seven collaborators in movement, sound and visual design. It will premiere in October 2022 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, NY.

VESSEL is the latest development of David’s research on the source and perception of identity, extending questions on how presence and absence operate within the human experience. Thematically, the work is strongly influenced by post colonialist writer Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relations, where he explores the concept of opacity as the unquantifiable definition of ‘other.’ He questions our ability to truly know another or even ourselves within the constructs of socio-political identity and prevents sufficient understanding of multiple perspectives of the world and its people. I have translated these questions into a poetics of presence, using a range of somatic and movement techniques to develop rituals of self- actualization, to guide us into a sensorial experience of self.

David’s work has been presented by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Performance Space New York, The Invisible Dog, Mt Tremper Arts, Roulette and Baryshnikov Arts Center. He has received support from Gibney Dance, The Robison Foundation, The MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Thomson was honored with a New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”) for Sustained Achievement (2001) and for Outstanding Production for he his own mythical beast (2018). He has been awarded fellowships from United States Artists|Ford, NYFA in Choreography, MacDowell, Yaddo, The Yard, The Rauschenberg Foundation and a LMCC Fellowship (2018-21). He is currently a Mabou Mines Associate Artist and Danspace Artist Research Fellow.

In 2017, he initiated The Sustainability Project with Kate Watson-Wallace, which serves as a platform and practice to expand the discourse surrounding ideas of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment within the arts community. Thomson began dancing at Haverford/Bryn Mawr Colleges and later received his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.

Please visit David’s Instagram, Facebook and website.