Sarah Michelson:
But separating myself from the dancers I knew was a way of allowing myself to work more concretely with movements themselves—to not rely on the “known” performance history or cachet of the performers. For these new dancers, I’ve been creating extreme, task-based series of movements that are not allowed to connect. For my own choreographic control, I’m struggling to eliminate a certain history of the dancer’s body, the part that comes through rhythm or a performer’s interpretation of how you get from one thing to the next. In this dance, I’m trying to create performers from scratch; I’m attempting to own and objectify them.
I recall having said, “I wonder if it’s possible to get away with reciting a poem during a dance—without being cheeseball.” So that was in the back of my mind: How could I make a dance that would support the structure of a poem?
My process thus far has been subtractive: Of course I’m going to make a dance featuring a limousine, but I don’t have to do that again, and now I’ve taken that away from myself. And now what’s left? Take away the limousine, and you get middle-class hunting scenes.
- she literally recasts and restages the piece as she travels from place to place, retaining the strongest elements of the previous performances but allowing the character of the new dancers and new locales to shape the piece as well. Each “module” remains complete in itself, but only one element in the work as a whole.
- “These dancers, this music, here, now,” Balanchine used to say,
- “The shows themselves aren’t just about dance steps,” she tells Gia Kourlas in 2003. “They’re about the people who are doing them and where. If it works, it’ll be a little bit magical. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up, but I really like surprises, and I think that undoing the expectations of your own theatrical community is important.”
- MODULAR DANCES: whole works that can be cut and pasted into other dances.
- "The first twenty-some minutes feature Rebecca Warner, as the Narrator, dancing as Michelson reads a long prose poem—a reworking of Genesis and the birth of Christ adulterated with personal reflections—written for the occasion by the playwright Richard Maxwell."
- Jim Fletcher (Adam) and Eleanor Hullihan (Eve), recalls Tharp’s choreography, though “Dance IX” has by now given way to a driven instrumental score by the composer Pete Drungle. The Adam-Eve duet is one of the most powerful and memorable dances in my memory: a twenty-five-minute-long, athletic pas de deux of sprints, jetés, stunts, entrances, exits.
- Normal Kamali costumes for Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room
-Michelson has the advantage: She knows how to make a box sing. The Whitney space is configured in a way that recalls the setups for both Daylight (P.S.122) and Devotion (at the Kitchen), with the audience seated on risers set against the longest wall, and the dancing area wider than it is deep, creating a shallow depth of field that stretches on and on to the left and right.
- George Balanchine in 1937: America has its own spirit—cold, crystalline, luminous, hard as light. . . . Good American dancers can express clean emotion in a manner that might almost be termed angelic. By angelic I mean the quality supposedly enjoyed by the angels, who, when they relate a tragic situation, do not themselves suffer.
- This dancer lives, with a special intensity and literalism, the internal split that arguably haunts every member of the precariat, every freelancer, every artist—the split between self and image, body and brand. Repetition, seriality: the lot of those individuals who market themselves, who “become brands,” who are expected to give the people what they want, over and over again.
- But while there may be humor here, and a distance to how the words are framed, there’s no evidence that she is engaging in deconstruction or critique. Nothing about Devotion Study #1 or the earlier Devotion evinces irony, pastiche, or irreverence. Their greatness in part is a function of the way they give dignity to the small, inexplicable texts and gestures they set in motion.
- We begin with habitation, a neighborhood, perhaps a place with which we connect—the Kitchen, P.S.122. And from this might emerge a habitus, unique sensibilities, attitudes, ways of moving through something we might call technique or simply the daily work, which might live for a little while in something brief called a dance. It comes out of and becomes a way of life, reinscribing a social world, or a psychic community of historical addressees.
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2011/01/01/sarah-michelson/
- Then I became interested in the culture of dance, and in questions like, When does someone start to become a dancer, or How does information go into the body? What does that look like in a little girl in Wales or New York? And what about the older, trained dancer? And what happens if you see those two together? I just got curious about training and the body and culture—my own culture, I guess.
- There’s such high intellect but such naiveté or simplicity. It’s not always good, but seeing that manifest in the performers’ bodies was very beautiful to me. Sofia Britos, who was the little girl in the cage, had already such a different, pop understanding of her body. I just became curious about all that.
- And then all of my questions: What is theater? What are we looking at? Who is a star? What’s virtuosity? Why is virtuosity sometimes exciting and sometimes repulsive? That’s a very interesting question. There’s something automatic about virtuosity, sometimes. Also—and this is probably not something that you, being generous and open-spirited, would ask—there is the question of authorship. I’m curious about authorship in my time on the planet, in the studio: What am I making? Who’s making it and where are these ideas coming from?
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Learn with Anna and Lucie, and Malia?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLxIM2OpCdc
Do these 8-person formations with basketball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbNvhuiKo7A
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The first dance I saw at Pageant was Ayano Elson's. She had divided the space with fabric curtains and there was an entertaining (to me) reveal. One of the performers had to move through the audience, seated on the floor, to get to her destination. The audience had to decide (starting, admittedly, with me) to stand up and walk to the new set of seats in the revealed space. The entire work had begun outside on the sidewalk across from the venue: we all gazed at a dancer and her shadow as she traversed the windowed edge of the room.
