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Mercurial George
“I only just got a bit of dirt under the nails with the last thing. Now wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig. So much debris! I couldn’t have predicted how much debris there would be and how much work I had created for myself in waking this beast. But they needed waking. I have seen the eyes and I’m circling, skipping, daintily lifting limbs and snif ng its scent. What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body? This is another science experiment. This is another ground on which to test skins that belong to me, out ts and ideas that may or may not have been imposed.” (Dana Michel)
In the wake of the acclaimed Yellow Towel, Mercurial George traces and transforms the banal, provoking a certain malaise. Sifting through the heaps of dusty clues leftover in the wake of initializing a cultural excavation, Dana Michel offers a destabilizing solo. The body vacillates as it struggles for balance and a toehold. Stretching out time with minimalist and deconstructed movement, Michel becomes the archeologist of her own persona.
“Michel’s poetic relationship to things is insistent. She investigates shapes and materials, reinventing sculptural forms in plastics, elastics, and doughs. Her work carves pathways through the felt, stuttering persuasively in moving registers of performance. Witty as well as socially astute, her performances loosen feeling. She withholds her body’s outlines (deferring visual recognition) while claiming opacity’s metamorphic scope. Mercurial George vibrates; it vibrates with me still.” (VK Preston, Performance Studies Scholar, Brown University/University of Toronto)
- Talk 12th April
After the performance 12th April, Eleanor Bauer will hold a Proto Talk with Dana Michel.
Eleanor Bauer: Proto Talks
Eleanor Bauer proposes a replacement for the conventional after-talk. Instead of trying to explain what we just saw with the already known, rehearsed, and press-released talk, Bauer talks to the artist whose work we’ve just seen about what remains yet unanswered, and perhaps yet to come. Proto Talks depart from what the artist doesn’t know for sure, making public discourse and shared imagination out of nascent ideas that are usually reserved for notebooks, dreams, or conversation with cohorts. Talking about things that aren’t yet fully understood, haven’t yet been realized, or don’t yet have a fully articulated justification, Proto Talks are an exercise in negative capability, in speculative theatre, in thinking together, in sharing the creative and imaginative space of uncertainty where artistic process fumbles around in the dark searching for form. Sometimes we don’t entirely understand things even when they’re finished and performed, so talking about the show we’ve just seen is not off-limits, but Getting all the answers is not the point of Proto talks. After-talks, publicity texts, program notes, and reviews can talk about what we think we know, but Proto Talks are an opportunity to talk about what we know we don’t know.
- About Dana Michel
Dana Michel (b. Ottawa, Canada) is a choreographer and live artist based in Montreal. In 2005, she graduated from the BFA program in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in her late twenties. Prior to this, she was a mar- keting executive, competitive runner and football player. She is a 2011 dance- WEB scholar (Vienna, Austria) and is currently an artist-in-residence at Usine C (Montreal, Canada).
Her first extended-length solo performance piece, Yellow Towel, was featured on the “Top Five” and the “Top Ten” 2013 dance moments in the Voir newspa- per (Montreal) and Dance Current Magazine (Canada) respectively. In 2014, she was awarded the newly created ImPulstanz Award (Vienna) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments and was highlighted amongst notable female choreographers of the year by the New York Times. That same year concluded with Yellow Towel appearing on the Time Out New York Magazine “Top Ten Performances” list. Her most recent and critically-acclaimed solo, Mercurial George, was premiered at Festival TransAmériques (Montreal) in June 2016. Both pieces are currently on tour.
In June 2017, Dana Michel was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance by the Venice Biennale (Italy).
- Credits
Conceived and performed by: Dana Michel. Lighting & technical direction: Karine Gauthier. Artistic activators: Martin Bélanger, Peter James, Mathieu Léger, Roscoe Michel, Yoan Sorin. Sound consultant: David Drury. Production: Dana Michel. Executive production: Daniel Léveillé Danse. Co-production: Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), Tanz im August (Berlin), CDC Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson (Paris), ImPulsTanz (Vienna), Chapter (Cardiff). Creative residencies: Usine C (Montréal), Dancemakers (Toronto), ImPulsTanz (Vienna), Actoral/La Friche Belle de Mai (Marseille), WOOP (Douarnenez), CDC Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson (Paris), M.A.I. (Montréal). With the support of: Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Canada Council for the Arts. Dana Michel receives administrative/development/communication support from PAR B.L.EUX (Montreal, QC) as an associate artist.
Presented in collaboration with Cullbergbaletten as part of the festival LABO Stockholm. The LABO festival is a part of the network initative Life Long Burning. Life Long Burning is supported by the Culture 2013-2018 programme of the European Union.
- LABO festival
This presentation is made in collaboration with Cullbergbaletten, and included in their festival LABO Stockholm. LABO Stockholm is a festival for contemporary dance, curated and produced by Cullbergbaletten within the frame of the European network Life Long Burning. 11-21 April 2018, LABO Stockholm presents performances, workshops and talks at different venues in Stockholm.
Read more here: www.cullbergbaletten.se
- Timetable
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