Michael is currently an artist with Dancenorth under the artistic direction Kyle Page and Amber Haines, based in Gurambilburra / Townsville, land of the Wulgurukaba and Bindal people.
Images by Robert Crisp (1), Amber Haines (2) and MONA FOMA (3)
Images by Robert Crisp (1), Amber Haines (2) and MONA FOMA (3)
I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and sea on which I live, work and create. I pay my respects to all First Nations peoples and their elders past and present. I recognise and honour their unique connection to place, community and movement. Sovereignty was never ceded.
Dance
for me is a kind of Holy Conglomerate, a place where the “impossible” resides, where fantasy / fabulation permeates realism, expanding the boundaries and capacities of our perceptual beings and the worlds we inhabbit. The studio - a cathedral, a sanctity of ritual and experimentation for bodies to disintegrate, disorient, collide and combust. In the everyday - we are pulled into and through the forces of a white, colonial, imperialist, capitalist modernity of a secular nature, where the individual is centred and expected to “thrive”. Dance invites a fracturing of this, pleasurably so.To dance is to quiver, to decay, to dislocate the body and its associated relationalities. To enter into a timeless vortex of swirling disarray, of feeling, sensing and participating outside the perceptual confines of the “typical”.
“Dancing is the doing of everything in its doingness.
The transitory. The unfinished.”
- Bayo Akomolafe
The transitory. The unfinished.”
- Bayo Akomolafe
DANCE IS NATURing
DANCE IS QUEERing
To be mischievously wandering and poking at the edges of this prescribed modernity is to be dancing. To be dining with the Rove Beetle (with its termite back-pack intact), to be moving with slug love, to be sensing through Orchid-intimacies is to be dancing.
There are threads at work here, through the works on this website, through the dances and dancings that have brought us into their making. Some speak through Cowboy-ish charms, others through extravagant Camp virtuosities, or Diva Goddesses and masked men, or through notions of paradise in a concrete territory. Such threads are felt, weaving their way through a body of work that is non-static, animistic and in process.
These works mean a great deal to me. Much time has been spent rigorously in process, with communities of bodies (human and non-human), who I hold a great deal of admiration and respect for. I am deeply inspired by the poets, thinkers, artists and doers who daringly lead and inspire through their respective works / worlds; Bayo Akomolafe, Donna Haraway, Erin Manning, Sophie Strand, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Sontag, Patti Smith, Rupert Sheldrake, Meg Stuart, Mark Tompkins (to name a few).
Folks, artists, organisations and supporters of these dances...
Companies / Organisations
Dancenorth Australia
The Farm
STRUT Dance
Metro Arts
Stompin
Funding Bodies
The Queensland Government through Arts Queensland
The Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts
RADAF
Flying Arts Aliance
Brisbane City Coucil
Festivals / Presenters / Celebrators
MONA FOMA
Brisbane Festival
Desert Festival (Mparntwe)
Dance Massive Site Responsive Showcase
Ars Electronica (Austria)
TanzZiet (Berlin)
AGITART Figueres Festival MOU (Spain)
Japan Media Arts Festival
Sunshine Coast Arts Prize.
Dance Artists
Ashleigh Musk
Anna Whitaker
Ben Ely
Gavin Webber
Kate Harman
Grayson Millwood
Felix Sampson
Kyle Page
Amber Haines
Jenni Large
Georgia Rudd
Nelson Earl
Damian Meredith
Sabine Crompton Ward
Tiana Lung
Liesel Zink
Martyn Coutts
Marlo Benjamin
Courtney Scheu
Itamar Freed
Pierce Eldridge
Cass Mortimer-Eipper
Paul Selwyn Norton
Guy Shomroni
Yaniv Abraham
Yilin Kong
Emma Harrison
Emma Fishwick
Lizzie and Zaimon Vilmanis (Prying Eye)
Nerida Matthaei (Phluxus2)
Gareth Belling (Collusion Music and Dance)
Amalia Pica
Melissa Lanham