Mercurial George

“I only just got a bit of dirt under the nails with the last thing. Now wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig. So much debris! I couldn’t have predicted how much debris there would be and how much work I had created for myself in waking this beast. But they need- ed waking. I have seen the eyes and I’m circling, skipping, daintily lifting limbs and snif ng its scent. What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body? This is another science experiment. This is another ground on which to test skins that belong to me, out ts and ideas that may or may not have been imposed.” Dana Michel

In the wake of the acclaimed Yellow Towel, Mercurial George traces and transforms the banal, provoking a certain malaise. Sifting through the heaps of dusty clues leftover in the wake of initializing a cultural excavation, Dana Michel offers a destabilizing solo. The body vacillates as it struggles for balance and a toehold. Stretching out time with minimalist and deconstructed movement, Michel becomes the archeologist of her own persona.

“Michel’s poetic relationship to things is insistent. She investigates shapes and materials, reinventing sculptural forms in plastics, elastics, and doughs. Her work carves pathways through the felt, stuttering persuasively in moving registers of performance. Witty as well as socially astute, her performances loosen feeling. She withholds her body’s outlines (deferring visual recognition) while claiming opacity’s metamorphic scope. Mercurial George vibrates; it vibrates with me still.” (VK Preston, Performance Studies Scholar, Brown University/University of Toronto)