The creation and production of MIKE is a commitment to highlighting the idea that without trust in ourselves and in others, it is impossible to safely live public lives that reflect our interior lives. We are sure to stagnate in a state of half-life and disharmony... gridlocked in the endless traffic of not knowing how to respect or even truly recognize the other. WE MUST LEARN HOW TO TRUST THE OTHER. We must first trust OUR «TRUE» SELVES in order to do this work. 

And so, with this work, I have created a list of three “musts”... around which I will sculpt a performative proposal: 

1) I/YOU/THEY MUST TRUST that we cannot healthily and consistently continue to work within modalities and environments that weren’t designed for a diversity of minds and hope to thrive or even survive; 


2) I/YOU/THEY MUST TRUST that “the arts” is where a large percentage of humans with highly diverse minds come for respite and in pursuit of flourishing. Artists, audiences and cultural workers alike come looking for a safer space to build other possibilities for existing in the world, and we could all benefit greatly from shifting into a modality that reflects more recognition of this diversity of minds in our day-to-day working practices; 


3) I/YOU/THEY MUST TRUST and believe in my/your/their interior experiences in order to advocate for them and therefore to build sustainable and possibly helpful-to-others futures. We must model self-respect. 


These musts are to be explored via a performative reflection on “work” culture. I will reflect on my business education and office work past, on my personal and professional administrative present, and on a conjuring of a working revolutionary and inclusive future. 

She is not present in their pornography. She is not found in their eroticisms. She is not even a part of her own fantasy world. 

CUTLASS SPRING is what sex might mean to me right now. I will roam inside a question: How might I locate my sexual identity within a multitude of complimentary and seemingly contradictory identities – as a performer, as a mother, as a daughter, as a lover, as a stranger? I will map a sexual education – with all of its embodiments, fabrications, and dissociations. I will follow these trajectories toward their softest core so as to discover what I hold back and what I make explicit. She will solicit her body and all of the many things that go with her person. She will realize what remains within her for sexual contemplation. Inching towards decensorship, engaging the infinite potential of everyday objects, CUTLASS SPRING is, at once, a manifesto and a heated reflection, an ethnography of sexual understanding and an archaeology of desire. Dana Michel et Michael Nardone

“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 my- self in waking this beast. But they needed waking. I have seen the eyes and I’m circling, skipping, daintily lifting limbs and sniffing 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 

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 feelings. 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)

“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 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 alter-egos in a performative 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. 

Dana Michel 

“The Caribbean-descent Canadian-born Dana Michel’s YELLOW TOWEL takes on the form of everything 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 strange- beautiful 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