Dana Michel is a live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, choreography, sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary to create a centrifuge of experience. Before graduating from the BFA program in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in her late twenties, Michel was a marketing executive, and a competitive runner and football player. In 2014, she was awarded the newly created ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments, and was highlighted among notable female choreographers of the year by the New-York Times. In 2017, Michel was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, she became the first ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre, Canada. In 2019, she was awarded the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Kuopio, Finland). Based in Montréal, Michel is currently touring four solo performance works: YELLOW TOWEL, MERCURIAL GEORGE, CUTLASS SPRING and MIKE.
As a child, Dana Michel would drape a yellow towel on her head in an attempt to become blonde and to be othered. In Yellow Towel, she revisits this escapist world of alteregos in a performa- tive ritual free longing to be free of censorship. Blending austerity and absurdity, she digs into tropes of black culture and of marginalized beings, turning them inside out to see whether or not she can relate. We witness her allowing a strange creature to emerge from this excavation in a slow and disconcerting metamorphosis that we follow with fascination. An attempt at exorcisms in technicolour.
YELLOW TOWEL premiered in 2013, and over ten years later Michel is revisiting it: returning to the research, conversations and questions that gave rise to the work through the conceptualization and publication of the piece’s score, developed together with Michael Nardone and presented as part of Festival Sâlmon. In this context, its presentation at the Festival is particularly valuable, as it allows for a deepening of issues shared by the curatorial program of this edition, such as the ethics of inscription, the possibility of finding forms of composition that make fugitive gestures possible, and legibility and abstraction in dance.
“The Caribbean-descent Canadian-born Dana Michel’s Yellow Towel takes on the form of ev- erything it sees, hears, smells – and then spits out every substance, sound, thought, every inch of mineral existence that comes its way, seeking not so much to transform it, but to explode the whole damn system. No matter the interpretations, it is obvious after being in the realm of (one of her) performance(s) that one has been witness to a necessary ceremony. With the undeniable unspoken social urgency, charm, excruciating humour, and strangebeautiful hypnotic-disturbing realm of her performance art dance pieces, Michel treats this experience through the lens of the fantastic, the ebulliently exploded, and the hallucinatory.” James Oscar
An amalgam of intuitive improvisation, choreography, and performance art, my practice is rooted in publicly exploring the multiplicity of being. I work with notions of performative alchemy and lucid dreaming – using personal history, current preoccupations, and future desires to create an empathic centrifuge of live moments between myself and those present. Today, my work can perhaps be described by some of its influences and inhabitations: sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary. In research, I alternate between the work that takes place in and out of the studio. I weave in and out of pouring over a subject – via writing, reading, video, and discussion – and relaxing my focus, letting the body take over. I feed myself with sound, silence, and dissonance – at times over-stuffing my body and psyche with stimulation to encounter its response. Minute details pop into my kinetic vision -manifesting movements, resonations, colours, textures, and certain experiences of light. These details clarify the trajectory of the work. Using difficulty as a navigational methodology comes naturally and coerces my performances into places of vulnerability and discovery. This is where I am able to listen at closest range, and to share with the least hesitation. Thinking about beings as mathematical proofs or portals, made up of billions of possibilities, deepens this listening. My offering is a repository that remains open to interpretation, a vast space for encountering and broadening one’s own logic of seeing and experiencing.
“I am always trying to run away from any pinning down of what I am trying to do or say, I have made a space to kind of communicate that like a cacophony.” Dana Michel.
Choreography, performance, set and costume design: Dana Michel / Lighting and Technical direction: Karine Gauthier / Artistic advisors: Ivo Dimchev, Peter James, Mathieu Léger, Antonija Livingstone, Manolis Tipos / Sound consultant: David Drury / Production: Dana Michel / Executive production: Parbleux / Distribution: Key-Performance – Anna Skonecka, Koen Vanhove / Coproduction: Festival Transamériques (Montréal), Studio 303 (Montréal) / Creative residencies: Compagnie Marie Chouinard (Montréal), M.A.I. (Montreal), Le chien perdu (Bruxelles), Usine C (Montréal), Circuit-Est Centre Choréographique (Montréal), Studio 303 (Montréal), Agora de la Danse (Montréal).
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Programme d’Action Culturelle du Cirque du Soleil, M.A.I.
