2022 · 60 min · Captions
CUTLASS SPRING
Watch the full film
- Rent 48 hours $5 Rent
- Buy Yours to keep $15 Buy
- Subscribe All 76 films for a year $50 Subscribe Renews yearly at $50 until you cancel
On campus or through your library? You may already have access. Check your access
About this performance
Inching towards decensorship, engaging the infinite potential of everyday objects, CUTLASS SPRING is, at once, a manifesto and a heated reflection, an ethnography of sexual understanding and an archaeology of desire.
"I’ve always been obsessed with...“sex stuff”. My much older sister majored in Psychology in University, and so I spent my childhood often sneakily pouring over her textbooks, always particularly fascinated with her human sexuality textbooks. These memories came oozing back this past year when my ve- year old started receiving special sexual education workshops at his daycare. It made me think that it was time to renew my own sex ed knowledge.
While i work with the body and movement in my work as a live artist, I have noticed an increasing disconnection with myself as a sexual being over the past 20 years. This widening ssure has stricken me as particularly troubling as i have always had a particularly keen interest in sexual investigation and a somewhat latent (and admittedly giggly!) interest in becoming a sexologist. In my past two works, I have to some extent been exploring the idea of repression - how I had been repressing certain aspects of my cultural identity and the repercussions of this kind of withholding. Moving further towards uncovering buried facets of my human composition, I would now like to delve into what has become the mystery of my sexual self and how it affects me as a human, a performer, a mother, a lover.
A couple of major questions, for instance:
How does a lifetime of hiding affect how we connect to others?
What are the effects of repression on how one loves, how one shares physical space with others, and how one shares their body with others?"
– Dana Michel
About the artist
Dana Michel
Dana Michel is a live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, choreography, sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary. Before graduating from the BFA program in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in her late twenties, Michel was a marketing executive and a competitive runner and football player. In 2014, she was awarded the ImPulsTanz – Director’s Award for YELLOW TOWEL, and was highlighted among notable female choreographers of the year by The New York Times. In 2017, Michel was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, she became the first ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre, Canada. In 2019, she was awarded the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Kuopio, Finland). In 2022, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded her the Jacqueline Lemieux Prize in recognition of her contribution to dance in Canada.
Based in Montréal, Michel is currently touring four solo performance works: YELLOW TOWEL, MERCURIAL GEORGE, CUTLASS SPRING and MIKE.