“How might I locate my sexual identity within a multitude of complementary and seemingly contradictory identities – as a performer, as a mother, as a daughter, as a lover, as a stranger?” This question is key to Canadian artist Dana Michels latest performance CUTLASS SPRING.

Michel has visited Black Box teater twice before with the solos Yellow Towel (spring 2015) and Mercurial George (fall 2016). Dealing with stereotypes, conventions and cultural identity, her original and sometimes extreme physical language keep challenging her audience. For CUTLASS SPRING, she is taking on the vast field of human sexuality – still operating within the topic of cultural repression, but this time using human sexuality as a lens to find how her professional and private life has shaped her sexual identity.  

Dana Michel is a choreographer and live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, sculpture, hip hop, comedy, cinematography, dub, and social commentary. She is currently touring three solo performance works, Yellow Towel, Mercurial George and CUTLASS SPRING, created in 2019. Based in Montreal, Dana Michel is an associate artist with Par B.L.eux.

Press: 

“By regularly leaving and entering the stage, appearing and disappearing, passing behind the stands, leaving the spectators with the only sound, but above all by including everything in his way of seeing and doing, the choreographer proposes an oceanic way, like Freud, of being together, of sharing—we repeat—his intimacy and his psyche, which emanate without restraint, with pleasure and generosity. Dana Michel has become, undeniably, a great performer, solid, charismatic. It is a pleasure to watch her dancing.” – Le Devoir

“Her choreography is a combination of small performances and numerous accessories. Dana Michel circulates there, often half-naked, in Parkinson gestures diverted from themselves, mental problems, memories and stuttering, in physical and imaginary movements that constantly seek and ricochet. The whole in an incomprehensible fluidity, which becomes narrativity, composing a universe where derivations become beauty, individuality.” – Le Devoir

“Michel reveals her process in creating the work, “locating [her] sexual identity within a multitude of complementary and seemingly contradictory identities” and what she’s really after.”  – The Dance Current