Rise west, set east: confounding expectations comes naturally to choreographer Sarah Michelson. "Shadowmann," her recent "site-specific anti-epic," revealed the spectacle that animates even ordinary human activities - Dance - Dance Review

Art in America, July, 2003 by Sarah Valdez

British-born, New York-based dancer and choreographer Sarah Michelson, age 38, mixes earnestness, irreverence, rigor, humor, aggressiveness and subtlety in often stark avant-garde work that, for the past decade, has been turning upside down many givens of performance. Her favorite boundaries to push are those between performers and audience, and between theater and the real world. Michelson's explorations (or, rather, near demolitions) of performance conventions have led her to execute entire evening-length performances nude, or to blanket her audience with plastic to keep them from getting wet as she splashed onstage in a little plastic wading pool full of water.

But it's not just for outre gestures like these that Michelson has become known as one of the most innovative choreographers to emerge on the contemporary dance scene in recent years. Her Group Experience of 2001, for which she was awarded a Bessie, began with nine dancers standing for five minutes straight in excruciating but not especially entertaining ankle-touching releve. This austere feat of endurance, first of all, had the effect of attuning audiences to the dancers' effort, down to every twitch and wobble. Additionally, it forced people to recognize the limits of their attention spans as spectators, and that they did have preconceived notions of what constitutes action. For The Experts, a work commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project last summer, Michelson costumed the ballet legend in Velcro handcuffs, gold chains and an ankle-length, see-through Chanel skirt, and set him to dance on a stage carpeted in bubble wrap. Such is her eclectic idea of elegance, never too pristine. Also last summer, Michelson's Grivdon @ the Grivdon appeared at Jacob's Pillow in the Berkshires. There, she had her performers in box-toed shoes and Dolce & Gabbana T-shirts ("misfits and outcasts who are in charge," as she describes them) flee the proscenium and perform, looking like fashion-afflicted nymphs, in the woods adjacent to the stage--a blatant clash of nature and culture.

Michelson's unconventional successes have only strengthened her commitment to mounting performances that are as well thought out as they are uncompromising. Her latest creation, Shadowmann (billed as a "site-specific anti-epic"), is her most ambitious project to date and took place this spring over the course of two nights at two Manhattan venues, the Kitchen and P.S. 122. In typical Michelson style, the piece trod a fine, paradoxical line between slapstick humor and utter seriousness. She describes its esthetic as "Machiavellian Bauhaus meets power ballad" and its plot as "a grandiose 'myth' that can conclude only with its utterly dainty deconstruction." This makes perfect sense, at least to the extent that the main rationale in Michelson's creative worldview is poetic.

For Shadowmann's first episode, the audience was herded en masse into the Kitchen's rather large black-box theater. They may or may not have noticed the performers, standing stock-still and scattered throughout the room, whom they had to pass by in order to get to their seats. Michelson arranged for viewers to face in the direction opposite from that expected, looking toward entryways and platforms on which chairs were piled up, rather than at a seamless wall or backdrop. ("The curtain rises west and sets east," Michelson says of Shadowmann, which employed no proper curtain.)

One dancer, Mike Iveson, who also composed the music for the show--a new-wave melange appropriating excerpts from recordings by Cibo Matto, New Order and Uriah Heep, among others--stood on a platform as viewers filtered in. He faced the audience with arms outstretched, Frankenstein-style, presiding over sound-mixing boards. Another dancer, Tanya Uhlmann, wearing a black cat suit, ran purposefully into the room and commenced repeatedly moving sideways from stage right to stage left, facing the audience, making the same graceful militaristic gesture--a kind of salute--over and over. A troupe of five preteen girls wearing black-and-white outfits with D & G logos took their place near the audience, stage right. They stepped in unison, in formation, from side to side, as if practicing something. Occasionally they paused to writhe with their backs against the wall in a movement that was sexually charged and very animal.

A ceremonial-sounding dirge combining a military drumbeat and a slow, electronic melody (as if for the wedding of futuristic royals, perhaps) filled the room. Two guardians (who spent the performance mostly standing still) opened double doors to reveal the slow approach of Michelson and another woman, Parker Lutz, dressed as twins, wearing identical bright yellow jackets and white gartered leggings. The two moved in near unison, yet remained slightly out of sync. They established a frenzied lexicon of energetic gestures: mantislike poking of hands, high leg kicks, arms outstretched as if searching, arms raised overhead as if receiving information, torsos arching backward while mincing on tiptoes. These two dancers had the most extensive and complex range of movement in the hierarchy of the Shadowmann cast. They brought to mind all the yearning, horror and frustration involved in any attempt to be at one with another human being, although their facial expressions, like those of the rest of the ensemble, remained resolutely blank.