Dana Michel
Mercurial George
13+14. November @ 20.00
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.
“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 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, outfits and ideas that may or may not have been imposed.” -Dana Michel
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 EXCECUTIVE PRODUCTION Par B.L.eux, Daniel Léveillé Danse (Until 2017) COPRODUCTION 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.
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 marketing executive, competitive runner and football player. She is a 2011 danceWEB 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 newspaper (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). She joigned Par B.L.eux as an associate artist.