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 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.

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)

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 Daniel Léveillé Danse
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 (Montréal, QC) as an associate artist.