Where to even start with this work?
Maybe I could start by telling you what happened? I could tell you that over a space of time that sometimes absolutely creaked by and at other times felt almost breathless in its pace, I watched Dana Michel create – a series? Or was it one, constantly growing, mutating, shrugging off before reforming, refitting, reshaping, learning, evolving, at times crushed under the weight of it all, half-formed – something… a creature? An animal? Characters or personas? Some kind of magical, or – a – I don’t know, some kind of –
No, that won’t work.
Maybe I could start by telling you all the things it made me think of? Trying when I was little to force my mouth to learn how to kiss my teeth (the ultimate rite of passage, I felt, for a young black woman), David Lynch’s Dumbland, about somebody asking the question, “when do children first learn that they are black?”, the ongoing (and shameful) internal sigh at the sight of silky, silky –
NOPE.
Maybe I could start by telling you about how the audience at times, plain couldn’t deal? How even when she wandered out into the seats a little, she still didn’t feel like part of us? How there was one moment when I felt the whole audience move forward? That over the next few days, when I asked people how they felt about it, they would splutter incoherently? That they didn’t know if it was OK to laugh (and that I really took pleasure in that tension)? About myself and the guy sat next to me not wanting to leave the space? How we didn’t know when to clap? How some people will just not ‘get’ this work?
Maybe I could start by telling you just how virtuosic it was? Or that the single most breath-taking moment was when she came out to bow? How, stood, back straight, exhausted, but calmly-full-of-power, she looked us dead in the eye. And I realised that I’d hardly seen her face the whole time, that she’d hardly stood up the whole time. Just how much tension was being held in her body, the extent to which she had literally made it look like those personas couldn’t fit inside her body?
But that was at the end.
Maybe I could start by telling you how her use of food literally made my heart sing? A bloated stomach that was never full: slices of banana placed into the mouth and spat out; her hands trapped in sticky white all American, sugar-sweet Fluff as she cried out for ‘Shaniqua’; milk, dribbling across her black tracksuit onto the stark white of the stage; the sound of biscuits being crunched, a constant feed with no nourishment –
NAH. I wouldn’t have the time or space to then touch on how the simplest colours became malevolent, how ripples in a white curtain felt like the very fabric of an identity that was liquid, fragile, constantly shifting, opaque, like the performance itself was being shaken. I wouldn’t have time to communicate to you the eerie sense that there was something outside of that white space putting something into it or absorbing something from it – a being that we couldn’t see, beyond the stark white of the floor and walls – that I’m still not sure how she did that.
Maybe I could start by telling you how frustrated I find myself about the use of the word ‘uncompromising’ at this point in time? We’ve got to stop using it, but I can’t find a word that communicates the extent to which Michel is just not here to make it easy for you. You are in her dreamscape, a landscape where maybe – just maybe – you can understand some of the signifiers, but if you can’t get them all? If you have to work? If you’re wrestling with it forever? Tough. Good. You can take it or leave it, because you’re seeing the landscape of someone’s inner psyche – them learning how to negotiate the world, learning how the world negotiates them and where they fit, and how they fit, where they will situate themselves. It’s not terrain laid out for your judgement. Michel rarely makes eye contact, rarely makes it easy for you to see her entire face. But the refusal to do this, her constant evading of that easy way in, is almost as confrontational as if she looked you in the eye the whole way through. Before us, but not for us, on the edge of words.
But if we need a better word for uncompromising, we also need a better word for compelling – another word that just doesn’t feel like it does this performance justice.
Maybe I could start with the yellow legged creature that Michel has left inside my head, which I am wrestling with but also rejoicing in the recognition of its familiarity? The moments when I knew exactly what she was getting at with my heart, and with my guts – even if I didn’t know with my brain?
I need you to understand… I love it. But communicating it to somebody else, who maybe didn’t see it?
Where do I even start with this work?
‘Dana Michel: Yellow Towel’ was originally written by Selina Thompson for www.thisistomorrow.info, 18 October 2014, http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/fierce-festival-dana-michel-yellow-towel