We 11.4.2018, 20:00-21:00, MDT
Th 12.4.2018, 20:00-21:00, MDT
“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)
Ottawa native, based in Montreal since 2000, Dana Michel is a Canadian of Caribbean descent whose family hails from the island of Saint Lucia. She describes herself as a live artist. Exploring the world of nuance, Dana caused a stir from the start with her first creations. Since then, she has been refining her exploration of time and improvisation, finding her own way into concepts such as identity, sexuality, and work—in other words, looking for ways to expand her relationship to existence. Each of Dana’s projects exposes her vulnerability and her quest to create more vital space for us all.
“MIKE” is her fourth major piece after “Yellow Towel” (2013), “Mercurial George”(2016), and “Cutlass Spring” (2019). In this last decade, her creations have garnered some remarkable accolades. In 2014, she received the ImPulsTanz Award in recognition of creative excellence. In 2017, she was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. In 2019, she received the International Prize for Live Art from the ANTI Festival (Kuopio, Finland). In 2022, she was awarded the Jacqueline Lemieux Prize by the Canada Council for the Arts for her significant contribution to dance in Canada.
Conceived and performed by
Lighting & technical direction
Artistic activators
Sound consultant
Production
Executive production
Co-production
Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), Tanz im August (Berlin), CDC Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson (Paris), ImPulsTanz (Vienna), Chapter (Cardiff).
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.
Presentation
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.
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