Yellow Towel: 10th Anniversary… and a Book!

Ottawa native, based in Montreal since 2000, Dana Michel is a Canadian of Caribbean descent whose family hails from the island of Saint Lucia. She describes herself as a live artist. Exploring the world of nuance, Dana caused a stir from the start with her first creations. Since then, she has been refining her exploration of time and improvisation, finding her own way into concepts such as identity, sexuality, and work—in other words, looking for ways to expand her relationship to existence. Each of Dana’s projects exposes her vulnerability and her quest to create more vital space for us all.

MIKE is her fourth major piece programmed by FTA, which previously presented her works YELLOW TOWEL (2013), MERCURIAL GEORGE (2016), and CUTLASS SPRING (2019). In this last decade, her creations have garnered some remarkable accolades. In 2014, she received the ImPulsTanz Award in recognition of creative excellence. In 2017, she was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. And in 2019, she received the International Prize for Live Art from the ANTI Festival (Kuopio, Finland). After receiving support from the Montreal organization Parbleux beginning in 2017, Michel developed her own production company, SCORP CORPS, in parallel with the creation of MIKE. This new professional step provides an opportunity for the artist to deeply reflect on the basic structure needed to support her creative work, while pursuing collaborations with new and long-time artistic and administrative partners.

An active collaborator across artistic practices to produce experimental editions and language works, Nardone’s recent collaborations include Dana Michel, Dylan Robinson, Ryan Clarke, and Tanya Lukin Linklater. His writings on literature, media, and sound are collected at soundobject.net.