HARP

Featured Media

Slideshow

Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula Sonnambula

Snaps of Sonnambula

Artist Bio

Michael Bodel (creator, director, choreographer) is a choreographer, puppeteer and dance theorist. He holds a BA in Dance and Astronomy from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Dance from Hollins University & The American Dance Festival. His current creative and scholarly interests include (alphabetically): Caribbean carnival, children, dance film, immigration, Michel Foucault, place, Ralph Lemon, reincarnation, relational aesthetics, semiotics, sensation and tourism. He is currently developing Dance and Other Archives, a series of subjective documentary performances about Brooklyn. The project spans personal interviews with the dancers’ grandparents, recordings from the West Indian Carnival Celebration on Eastern Parkway, and dances choreographed to classified ads from the Park Slope Parents blog. This evolving series has iterated at One Arm Red and the American Dance Festival, and it will have a site-specific incarnation in Spring 2012 at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Michael’s multi-modal works for stage include Mrs Hodges Was Struck by a Meteorite (2005) about love and the probability of being hit by various objects, and Sun Sheets & Small Shoes (2006) a dance for 4 women, bed sheets & 40 baby shoes. Michael has directed two dance films — Greece Piece (2008) and Night Wine (2006), and curates the ongoing FRAMEWORKS dance film series at Dance New Amsterdam. He is half of the absurdist devised-theater duo Farmers for Flight Attendants, which authored three athlete related physical comedies encapsulated by The Sports Trilogy at the Philly Fringe Festival (2005-2008), and is now creating a power-point presentation with dance breaks on reincarnation and the Civil War.

Casey Cole (vocalist/ musical director) is based in Berlin, Germany, where she regularly works with musicians from the Deutsche Oper, Komische Oper Berlin and Bayreuther Festspiele. She has recently made the successful transition to lyric soprano repertoire. In 2009, she sang the role of Vitellia with dell'Arte Opera Ensemble. Casey has recently been featured in a concert series in Berlin, singing excerpts from Maria Stuarda, Turandot, and Pagliacci, and has performed with Kentucky Opera in the title role of Williamson's The Happy Prince, and in New York as Miss Todd in The Old Maid and the Thief, Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte, and Marcellina in Le Nozze di Figaro. She has created roles in several world premieres with American Opera Projects and Encompass New Opera Theater. Casey made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003 as a soloist with the New York City Chorale and was a finalist in the New Jersey Alliance for Performing Arts and Lotte Lenya competitions.

Casey holds degrees from New England Conservatory and Boston University. She has also trained as an actor with the SITI Company and the Actor's Workshop Boston and been a faculty member at the Lee Strasberg Institute for Theater and Film.

Malina Rauschenfels (cellist/ arranger) attended the Eastman School of Music where she graduated with distinction receiving a BM double major in cello performance and composition, and a minor in Spanish from the University of Rochester. There she studied cello with Steven Doane and Rosemary Elliott, cultivating a love of tone, phrasing, performance practice and good teaching. She studied composition with David Liptak, Augusta Read Thomas, and Sydney Hodkinson, developing a confidence in her unique compositional tastes and a love of new music. She received a Masters of Music from The Juilliard School where she discovered the art of dance and its subsequent influence on gesture and theatricality on all of her future compositions and performances. She also performed Davidovsky's Divertimento for Cello and Orchestra with the Juilliard Orchestra under Reinbert de Leeuw. She has performed in Canada, France, Italy, Serbia, Montenegro, and numerous states, and conducted, had premieres, played cello, and sung at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall and The Juilliard Theater. Currently Malina heads the Strings program grades four through twelve at The Packer Collegiate Institute. She curates, performs in and produces performances combining her love of dance, cello, singing, early music and new music with armies of choreographer/dancer composer/performer friends where she seeks to weaken the boundaries that have grown to separate the arts into their disparate areas.

Artist Statement

Let art unfold from life; let it occupy the same space.  Art is not a model, nor is it restricted to representation and metaphor. Art lays, like a tracing paper, on the detailed contours of a timely topography. By drawing we draw attention. Of course, in live arts, we draw in four dimensions (at least).

Question. And let the deep, unnerving panic of questioning float amid my dancing. Respect, without stepping back. Investigate difference; transcend it; restore it. See the people in the room, and ride the skin between yourself and the unknowable outside.

If you want to do a dance about something, then write an essay instead.

Ignore insistence on frames, institutions, and historical discourses; those are natural consequences of a society that thinks it needs to force communion. To move with consciousness is already to tie your self to the immense depths of human history. Let me realize that no dance is mine, that it resides in the space between myself, my collaborators, and every possible audience member, who deserves my care, forgives my ignorance, and respects the depth of my rigor.

Connect

• Contact Michael

• mbodel.net
• Vimeo
• Flickr