Michelson’s Fetish Play Is a 25-Day Dance About a Lifetime of Making Dances

Sarah Michelson’s nowhere is a 25-day dance at the Museum of Modern Art, and it is a dance about a life spent making dances. The work runs daily through October 11, and it is full of objects, sounds, and projections that keep returning in new forms.

The performers carry white duffel bags labeled “Dance | Debt.” That is the first clue. Michelson’s work is known for stealing from herself, and nowhere is that idea on steroids. The whole piece is a wormhole of self-reference, with notes like “endless self-referential tunnel/wormhole/abscess/parade.”

The Duffel Bags and the Billboards

The piece features Michelson herself, who presses against the wall in a lazy, soupy dance as a machine fires ping-pong balls at her. Two performers, Lauren Bakst and Juli Brandano, wheel large silver sculptures of women dancers. These sculptures resemble Degas’s ballerinas, but they are spun to the soundtrack of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”, and they do not hide either.

One piece is built around a necklace that reads out “cunt.” The other carries a tattooed heart marked with the words “RIP Steve Paxton.” These two works serve as totems to dancers, whose discipline Michelson holds in a near-spiritual light even as she demands of them a punishing, almost sadomasochistic devotion to difficulty and repetition.

A Constant Presence

Choreographer Alexa West told me Michelson is in her “meta period.” nowhere is not a dance about dance; it is about a lifetime of making dances with dancers, including this brief stop at MoMA. Michelson talks to the audience frequently, often explaining what is happening, but never explaining why.

The logic of nowhere is both entirely plain and unanswerable, and it sits within an emotional softness that refuses any single reading of it. Unlike Sontag, Michelson is not opposed to interpretation; she merely exists beyond it. nowhere appears to care nothing for how its audience takes it in, and whether this is a trouble may depend on where one is sitting.

The 25-Day Stretch

The piece stretches out time. Certain actions are set before us to ruminate on until they lose their flavor and their liveliness, while others vanish almost at once, sweet in the awareness of their absence. It is a system of time that leaves you feeling both at ease and oddly drawn in, nervous about even a short trip to the bathroom in case you miss something amusing.

Michelson shows great cunning and ambition in the devilish grace with which she arranges both the time of nowhere and its motley assemblage of actors. She is a constant presence, a recalcitrant yet loving lodestar.

I left convinced that only Michelson herself could take in the full scope of this vast dance — a constant presence, a recalcitrant yet loving lodestar. For a choreographer known for guarding her privacy and keeping her secrets, this might be her way of handling the public nature of the Marron atrium.

Key Facts

• nowhere runs daily at MoMA through October 11
• The work spans 25 days
• Performers carry bags labeled “Dance | Debt”
• One sculpture bears a tattooed heart with the words “RIP Steve Paxton”
• The soundtrack includes Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”
• Michelson is described as being in her “meta period”
• nowhere is a dance about a lifetime of making dances with dancers, including this brief stop at MoMA

I am looking right at Michelson, and she sits before me with a smile so beatific that it has never failed to strike me. She asked me what I thought.

Source material: “Sarah Michelson’s Delicate Fetish Play,” Hyperallergic.

choreography · dance · MoMA · performance art · Sarah Michelson