I saw an early kernel of this work during Eiko Otake’s Platform at Danspace in 2016, and then later at  Draftworks before the whole shebang at The Chocolate Factory. I was struck immediately by the start of it; Michelle humbly enters the space with a radio that she places on the floor and turns on. Her arms float backwards and outwards like wings as her hands glide down, almost like removing a plastic sleeve from a vinyl. She then jogs in place, creasing her legs forward and back; a smile evolves into a wide joyous silent sigh, which peels off into a warped face wrought with relentless exhaustion. It’s both funny and grotesque, and emanates not only the physical endurance through struggle, but the emotional undercurrent that comes with it.  The audience is presented with this moment of slow motion as if Michelle is entering an extradimensional portal (isn’t that we hope for in every performance? The transcendence of the multilayered spirit?)

Michelle’s hands in this piece slide through the air, organizing and tending to unseen constellations with fingers, fruits and feathers. I sense the changing viscosity of these energies, which morph from floating cotton balls to beads on a rhizomatic abacus. The dissolution and reappearance of the textures through Michelle’s body evoke a channelling of the other, but is also hindered by the futility of the mundane and this feels right; isn’t passion hindered by states of waiting, perhaps for someone to call us back on our banana phone, or perhaps for the stars we search for to take us out of our body? We can only “get down on it” for the length of a song.

Watching this work again made me jump into another one of Michelle’s videos, an excerpt of ‘WONDER” which premiered at Issue Project Room in 2013, which I’ve never seen in person but I’d sell a finger to see now. Michelle stomps around the space, undressing from an olive beige leotard and purple undershirt into a wild aqua prom dress (with a matching wig.) As she traverses around the floor you can hear a tenor voice through the speakers, and she affirmatively screams in response:

Is there enough time?

YEAH!

Are you enough?

YEAH!

Are we running out of time?

YEAH!

Good.

Good.

YEAH!

Do you want to be all of it?

YEAH!

Do you want to have all of it?

YEAH!

You are all of it.

YEAH!

I find in Michelle’s work a truth, that joy is fun but also exhausting? And to “not cheer just for the good because the bad needs to exist in the world too”, as Michelle says in her context video. I also see her in her final duet with Bryn Hlava, accepting that the orbs of transcendence we strive for are within us if we search for them, sacrificing our sweat, our plumage, our time.