YOU CANNOT CAN
Dana Michel considers the ability to swim to be one of the ways in which we might embody self-trust and wonders why, despite many attempts at learning, she still cannot really feel at ease in the water. And what is it that holds back the majority of her family from swimming, despite hailing from an island that is surrounded by both the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea? How safe can you feel in the world if you cannot float in the liquid that makes up a large part of your body? With YOU CANNOT CAN, Michel creates a solo performance in a swimming pool. Surrounded by the audience, she wades inside global histories and socio-economic realities of swimming and safe access to water. She uses her kaleidoscopically-curious approach to focus on how we might shake off fears. Might this watery adventure be an entry point to ultimate liberation?
Credits
Created and performed by: Dana Michel
Artistic activators: Alex Samaras, Angélique Willkie, Heidi Louis, Karl Notargiovanni, Roscoe Michel, Sierra Holder, Simon Couturier, Tracy Maurice, Yoan Sorin.
Scenographic consultant - Technical direction: Romain Guillet
Sound consultant: David Drury
Production: SCORP CORPS - Dana Michel, Viva Delorme.
Distribution: neon lobster - Giulia Messia & Katharina Wallisch
Coproduction: Arsenic - Centre d’Art Scénique Contemporain, Bergen Internasjonale Teater, Festival TransAmériques, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, MDT, O Espaço do Tempo, Tanzquartier Wien.
Creative residencies: Baltic Triennial, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity - Leighton Artist Studios, Battersea Arts Centre, Centre de Création O Vertigo – CCOV, Festival TransAmériques, Fierce Festival and performance, possession + automation with funding from Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Institutet, Kinosaki International Arts Center, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, marvaða, Rimbun Dahan, The Chocolate Factory, Toronto Dance Theatre, Tangente St. Pölten.
The creation of this work is being made possible thanks to the financial support of Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and Conseil des Arts de Montréal.
mike
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...
3) I/YOU/THEY MUST TRUST and believe in my/your/their interior experiences...
These musts are to be explored via a performative reflection on “work” culture...
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...
3) I/YOU/THEY MUST TRUST and believe in my/your/their interior experiences...
These musts are to be explored via a performative reflection on “work” culture...
Credits
Created and performed by: Dana Michel
Artistic activators: Viva Delorme, Ellen Furey, Peter James, Heidi Louis, Tracy Maurice, Roscoe Michel, Karlyn Percil, Yoan Sorin.
Scenographic consultant - Technical direction: Romain Guillet
Sound consultant: David Drury
Production: SCORP CORPS - Viva Delorme, Dana Michel
Distribution: neon lobster - Giulia Messia & Katharina Wallisch
Co-produced by ARSENIC - Centre d’art scénique contemporain, Centre national des Arts in Ottawa, Festival TransAmériques, Julidans Amsterdam, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, MDT, Montpellier Danse, Moving in November, Wexner Center for the Arts of The Ohio State University in Columbus.
Creative Residencies: Alkantara, ANTI Festival, Centre national des Arts in Ottawa, Kinosaki International Arts Center and Kyoto Experiment, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Montpellier Danse...
The creation of this work is being made possible thanks to the financial support of Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie and Conseil des Arts de Montréal.
CUTLASS SPRING
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
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
Credits
Conceived And Performed by: Dana Michel
Artistic Advisor: Ellen Furey, Peter James, Mathieu Léger, Heidi Louis, Tracy Maurice, Roscoe Michel, Karlyn Percil, Yoan Sorin, Alanna Stuart
Lighting Design: Karine Gauthier
Sound Consultant : David Drury
Technical Direction : Karine Gauthier And Caroline Nadeau
Production: Dana Michel
Executive Production: Parbleux
International Distribution: neon Lobster - Giulia Messia & Katharina Wallisch
A co-production by Arsenic - Centre D’art Scénique Contemporain...
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.
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 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)
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)
Credits
Choreography, Performance, Set And Costume Design: Dana Michel
Lighting And Technical Direction: Karine Gauthier
Artistic Advisor: Martin Bélanger, Peter James, Mathieu Léger, Roscoe Michel, Yoan Sorin
Sound Consultant: David Drury
Production: Dana Michel
Executive Production: Parbleux
International Distribution: neon Lobster - Giulia Messia & Katharina Wallisch
A co-production by CDC Atelier De Paris-Carolyn Carlson...
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.
YELLOW TOWEL
“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
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
Credits
Scenography and Costumes: Dana Michel
Lighting and Technical Direction: Karine Gauthier
Artistic Advisor: Ivo Dimchev, Peter James, Mathieu Léger, Antonija Livingstone, Manolis Tsipos
Sound Consultant: David Drury
Production: Dana Michel
Executive Production: Parbleux
International Distribution: neon Lobster - Giulia Messia & Katharina Wallisch
A co-production by Festival Transamériques, Studio 303 (Montréal)
Creative Residencies: Compagnie Marie Chouinard (Montréal), M.A.I. (Montréal), Le Chien Perdu (Brussels - Bruxelles), Usine C (Montréal), Circuit-Est Centre Chorégraphique (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.
TOUR DATES
UPCOMING, PAST
Dana Michel
26.03
Madrid, Spain
MIKE at Teatros del Canal
Dana Michel
31.03
Bruxelles, Belgium
MIKE at Bozar
Dana Michel
09.04
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
MIKE at Five Arts Centre
Dana Michel
17.05
Montréal, Canada
MIKE at MAC - Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
Dana Michel
07. - 08.06
Flørli, Norway
MIKE at Outpost
Dana Michel
25. - 26.07
Marsoui, Canada
YELLOW TOWEL at Festival FURIES