27 June 2017
Dana Michel
Silver Lion for innovation
Awards ceremony
Tuesday June 27th
Tese dei Soppalchi - 7:00 pm
The Silver Lion for innovation in Dance has been awarded to Dana Michel.
This young artist has only created two or three works, and she has already found her way into our memories. She is continually in the process of re-creating her current history, live, in front of us, infusing the stage with her own propensity for fluctuating identities and, somehow, she inseminates us with the desire to follow her.
She is a child, a philosopher with no words, she is a creator, she is a precious phenomenon of very serious humour. With total confidence and in a state of unusual peace, she reconstructs the raw and complex experience of simply being.
(Marie Chouinard)
Biographical notes
Dana Michel (Ottawa 1976) – Dana Michel is a choreographer and performer based in Montreal. Before earning her BFA in Contemporary Dance program at Concordia University in her late twenties, Dana Michel was a marketing executive, competitive runner and football player. In 2011, she was a danceWEB scholar in Vienna. She is currently an artist-in-residence at DanceMakers in Toronto and at the Usine C centre in Montréal, Canada. Her artistic practice, an amalgam of choreography, improvisation and performance art, is rooted in exploring identity as a disordered multiplicity.
She works with notions of "post-cultural bricolage", alternating live moments, object appropriation, fragments of personal history, desires and current preoccupations to create an empathetic centrifuge of experience between the artist and the spectators.
In 2013, Yellow Towel was featured in the lists of "top five" and "top ten" dance works respectively in the monthly "Voir" and in Dance Current Magazine. In 2014, she won the Impulstanz Award (Vienna) for her exceptional artistic results and was singled out as one of the most significant choreographers of the year by the New York Times. At the end of 2016 Yellow Towel appeared in the list of "Top Ten Performances" in Time Out of New York. Her new solo piece Mercurial George won an award at the Festival TransAmériques in June 2016 and is still on tour. Last October, she was invited to Berlin to present her most recent short work (20 minutes) titled Palna Easy Francis, as part of the Sophiensaele Witch Dance Project.