DANA MICHEL IN CONVERSATION WITH JAAMIL OLAWALE KOSOKO

Published 2013. Movement Research - Critical Correspondence

Is there such a thing as a Black abstractionist aesthetic in live performance? Can the Black body exist in live performance without the concern of euro-centric or westernized legibility? How might the Black female body behave in the public domain when void of the need to be stereotypically attractive in the eyes of the hetero-masculine gaze? All of the above questions seem to be thematic concerns of Dana Michel's Yellow Towel, which opened this past January in New York City as a part of performance curator Ben Pryor's American Realness Festival at Abrons Art Center. Yellow Towel, which originated in a workshop at the 2011 ImPulsTanz dance festival in Vienna, began as a poetic critique and exploration of hair and a need to understand what ingredients within the female body may create a recipe for beauty. Through the instruction of Ivo Dimchev, Michel entered into a two-year psycho-somatic journey of vocal work, vulnerability, deep listening, and character creation. At times wittily comedic while devastatingly sad, the work, which premiered at Festival TransAmériques in Montréal, Québec in May 2013, evokes themes of androgyny, memoir, sensation through strategically placed improvisation. The end result takes various iconographic imagery of black culture and distorts it into a dissident and otherworldly 75-minute, visually captivating solo…