His name was Damasus Michel. He had emigrated from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in the early 1970s. He settled in Ottawa, where he worked all his life as a janitor in hospitals. In February, he passed away in silence, like the discreet employee he had always been. He was 79 years old.
Damasus Michel, nicknamed “Mike” by those around him, was the father of Dana Michel. And it is partly to pay tribute to him that the Montreal performer has chosen to title her new show Mike, which will have its North American premiere at the Festival TransAmériques (FTA), from Thursday to Sunday.
The room is nothing like a family photo album. If Dana Michel is inspired by her father, it is to question more generally our relationship to the culture of work, which occupies a preponderant place in our lives, not to say invasive.
“It’s a very open proposition,” explains the artist. I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just thinking about it. Thinking about it in public… What is work? How do we do it? How does it feel when we do? How does it feel to have done it? How do we work with others, sometimes even without knowing who we are? In short, it’s the job of a big ‘t’, a medium ‘t’ and a small ‘t’…”
With such topical and fundamental questions, no wonder Mike lasts three hours. Dana Michel needed this space-time to articulate and develop her thinking. But she immediately reassures those who might hesitate before the duration of his performance: Mike is neither a straightjacket nor a prison.
Go to the toilet ? Maybe. Sleep ? We doubt it. Whether we like the particular universe of Dana Michel or not, it is difficult to remain indifferent to him. Her relationship to beauty disturbs. His way of using everyday objects is intriguing. Just like his choreographic approach, both minimal and radical, which is indisputably “buggery”.
Dance ? Performance ? She doesn’t know. And besides, she doesn’t care. “What interests me is the plasticity of the body,” she replies.
Its originality, in any case, does not go unnoticed. Since her first solo piece in 2013 (Yellow Towel), Dana Michel’s reputation has only grown internationally.
In 2014, the Montreal artist was honored by the New York Times and ranked by Time Out New York magazine as one of the best performers of the year. In 2017, she received the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance (for her show Mercurial George) at the Venice Biennale. She presents her work all over the world, from Singapore to Brussels, where she has just presented Mike in a world premiere at the renowned Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Belgian equivalent of the FTA.
Sign of recognition: these ten years of work are at the heart of the book Yellow Towel: A Score, written with Montreal author Michael Nardone, which is to be launched next week at the FTA. Opportunity to measure the path traveled and to question the evolution of the artist, whose work can be summed up in four solo shows in a decade.
The artist suggests, in this sense, that Mike will be more “relaxed” and “down to earth” than his previous pieces. Then takes the opportunity to claim the influence of another Mike – Kelley this one – a visual artist who died in 2012, with whom she shares a certain attraction for the strange, the bizarre and the uncomfortable. “He never felt he belonged,” she sums up.
Mike Kelley certainly didn’t live in the same world as Damasus “Mike” Michel. But Dana Michel is somewhere in between. That’s what makes it unique. And that’s why Mike piques the curiosity…
