APAP SEASON CHOICES: Dana Michel

Dana Michel performs Mercurial George
in this year's American Realness festival.

The Black Canadian dance artist Dana Michel--who made a big splash at home and here in New York in 2014 with her solo Yellow Towel--is back with a new solo, Mercurial George, at Abrons Arts Center for American Realness.

She has described the hour-long piece as an act of “wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig” asking “What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body?” A seeming extension of Yellow Towel, with its genesis in racial stereotypes, Mercurial George implies the release of an authentic identity not imposed by others.

This is pertinent for exploration. Identity and marginal otherness--from immigration status to religion to gender--are battlegrounds with renewed real life-or-death stakes in the current moment. And Michel is a curious, fearless explorer, eccentric and mercurial indeed in her body language, fascination with the odd prop oddly used, and tendency to randomly mumble or declaim. She opens dimensions of mind and body that we usually declare unseemly and diseased and seems to say, "Look what else is here."

It's an interesting task and an interesting approach, requiring a performer who can submerge her calm, charming persona and grab hold of a viewer, no matter how resistant, for the space of an hour. Not easy. Go take a look and see what else is there.

Mercurial George
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Here's a mini-interview with Dana Michel

on the occasion of her January 2014 presentation of Yellow Towel

for American Realness.

(And here is my review of that show.)

Mercurial George will be presented again on Monday, January 9 at 4pm and Tuesday, January 10 at 7pm. Run Time: 55 minutes. For information on this and other American Realness events, now through January 12, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
(Experimental Theater)
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Okwui Okpokwasili's "Bronx Gothic" at Danspace Project

Okwui Okpokwasili in her solo, Bronx Gothic
(photo by Ian Douglas)

Okwui Okpokwasili's Bronx Gothic--an arresting work-in-progress shown during Ishmael Houston-Jones's PLATFORM 2012: Parallels--has now returned to Danspace Project as a complete, evening-length masterpiece. Commissioned by Danspace Project and Performance Space 122, it had its world premiere as part of COIL 2014 and will continue through February 1.

But before you read on about Bronx Gothic, I'd like you to read my post on Dana Michel's Yellow Towel if you have not done so already. You'll find that here. Go and come back. Promise?

You're back? Great. Now I can tell you about Part Two of my evening.

So...I made it through almost all of Michel's show at Abrons then raced out to try to catch a bus uptown. I just missed that particular bus and ended up reaching Danspace Project with maybe two minutes to spare. By the time I made it down from the restroom--no way was I going to sit through 90 minutes more without a pit stop--Okpokwasili had already launched her solo, coursing a continuous orgasmic tremor through her entire body, her liquid muscles, her long, expressive arms. As I slipped into one of the remaining seats, I realized that the dancer's director and designer, Peter Born, had enclosed the space and her entire audience in white curtains similar to the ones Michel had used for her own solo. That was a moment.

For Bronx Gothic, Okpokwasili, raised by her Nigerian immigrant parents in the Bronx, had turned to her youth for inspiration--just like Michel--and mined painful memories of friendship, treachery and despair. Her text--by turns, witty, delicate and lacerating--takes us right back there through the device of a running record of notes surreptitiously passed between an 11-year-old girl and her more worldly school pal. Yes, what kids did before texting.

Sex is the topic of concern and fascination for these two preteens. Their language is frank; the implications of some of the talk--the unstated likelihood that the pal is being abused by her mother's boyfriend--is worrisome. But along with great pain, Okpokwasili finds humor and a certain powerful glamour in female strength, even when it's just fronting, and something literally tidal, earthshaking, in longing and anger.

I had seen Okpokwasili's performance at DP's Parallels and looked forward to Bronx Gothic in finished form. I can report that, since Parallels, this artist has achieved a rare balance between physical and vocal tours de force. These performing modes run parallel throughout the piece, doubling the required prodigious control and stamina. There should be not only a Bessie but Olympic gold for what Okpokwasili has now accomplished. The fact that, in the midst of this great feat of performance, she breaks your heart, absolutely slays you with the poetry of it, makes it all the more remarkable.

Bronx Gothic continues with 8pm performances through February 1. For complete schedule details and to reserve tickets, click here.

Danspace Project

131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue), Manhattan

(directions)

Dana Michel's "Yellow Towel" at Abrons

Dana Michel
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Dana Michel sidles out from behind a white curtain stretched along one wall. She seems shy, at first, not sure or secure about being seen. She's dressed in a black hoodie that hides her long dreadlocks, and in black slacks and shoes with thick soles. Her tense arms anchor her balled up hands like stumps at waist height. She moves in stiff, tiny jerks and twists of ankles and elbows and does not look at us. What's that box-like object poking out from the back of her hoodie? What are those squawking noises coming from her mouth? What's that white stuff smeared around her mouth?

"Ah...ah...obviously, I am the creator, and this is my house...."

We're at American Realness 2014 in the Experimental Theater at Abrons Arts Center, watching a performance called Yellow Towel, a US premiere of a work by a Canadian dance artist.  But it sure seems like we're trapped in a room with one of those eccentric street people we consider damaged goods and give wide berth. We're trapped for 75 minutes, forced to look at and listen to this person who moves in front of these white curtains like animated Expressionist brushstrokes rendered in thick black paint. She's a living piñata whose garments erupt in showers of Q-tips or rubber bands. When she goes with her impulses, she's all body--spread, contorted, vulgar, messy--and working on her own system, taking her time with everything in an environment that, except for her occasionally lucid mumblings and outbursts, can be dead silent.

That baseline quiet, and that pace in which little happens and what happens makes little sense, controls us. It is her show. A kind of victory in that.

Michel's publicity sources Yellow Towel in her childhood envy of girls with blonde hair and suggests that the solo probes Black stereotypes via her revealing, uncensored alter ego. You have ample time to think about that and what it might mean that her alter ego owns a laptop upon which she drapes a big, curly Afro wig.

I first saw Dana Michel performing a solo--the greater the weight--in the spring of 2007 at PS 122's DANCEOFF! series and noted that the Montreal-based artist was a "killer soloist" with "fiery authority." Seven years later, in Yellow Towel, she is no less than that.

Yellow Towel is now closed. For information about other American Realness 2014 events at Abrons Arts Center (through January 19), click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

DANCEOFF!

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

DANCEOFF!--the cheeky omnibus series curated by Terry Dean Bartlett and Katie Workum--concluded another season last week at P.S. 122 with work by choreographers Heather McCardle, Nicole Wolcott, Andrew Dinwiddie, Dana Michel and Brian Brooks as well as comic interludes by Nathan Phillips. For the first time, Workum said, neither she nor Bartlett would perform in the show. Why not? Well, besides Bartlett's engagement with his home company--fantabulous STREB, kicking it in SLAMSHOW 9 over in beautiful Williamsburg--the two dancers were simply "too old," Workum joked, for DANCEOFF!

A statement like that is enough to spur the New York Times to publish a piece about ageism in dance (and kudos to the Times for recently taking a couple of whacks at racism and size-ism in dance). DANCEOFF! indeed has a youthful slant towards informality, high energy, sexiness and humor. I don't think you have to be a young hipster to have goofy fun at DANCEOFF! or find something that will continue to intrigue you beyond its moment, but it does help to not take yourself or postmodern dance all that seriously.

DANCEOFF! always introduces me to someone or something of interest, and this time those someones are Dana Michel, a black dancer-choreographer from Montreal with a background in track and touch football, and New York's Andrew Dinwiddie (co-curator of the highly-regarded Catch series, a spinoff of DANCEOFF!, at Galapagos).

Michel, who performed an excerpt from the greater the weight, is a killer soloist who tackles the warped, frenetic and fierce rhythms of her piece with precision and fiery authority. Check her out next time.

Dinwiddie's understated movement in Get Radical! seemed to provide a soft background for the bravura performance of a radio talk show financial advisor holding forth in its accompanying recording. Seems like it should be the other way around, right? Dance backed up or at least embraced by its sound? But even Dinwiddie's choice of this guy's concocted spiel--as theatrical as a preacher's--made me curious to find out whatever else Dinwiddie might have up his sleeve. I like him more for his sensibilities than for his choreography--at least what I can tell from Get Radical!--but I'll be happy to see more.

(c) 2007 Eva Yaa Asantewaa