Yellow Towel

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.

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.

“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

CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE Dana Michel
SET AND COSTUME DESIGN Dana Michel
LIGHTING + TECHNICAL DIRECTION Karine Gauthier
ARTISTIC ADVISOR Ivo Dimchev + Peter James + Mathieu Léger + Antonija Livingstone + Manolis Tsipos
SOUND CONSULTANT David Drury
PRODUCTION Dana Michel
EXCECUTIVE PRODUCTION Daniel Léveillé Danse
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS Heidi Louis + Chad Dembski
COPRODUCTION Festival TransAmériques + Studio 303
CREATIVE RESIDENCIES Compagnie Marie Chouinard + MAI + Le Chien Perdu (Bruxelles) + Usine C + Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique + Studio 303 + Agora de la Danse
WITH THE SUPPORT OF Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec + Canada Council for the Arts + Cirque du Soleil Cultural Action program + MAI

Dana Michel receives administrative/development/communication support from Par B.L.eux (Montréal, QC) as an associate artist