"Bodel has a talent for conjuring striking and mysterious images... at once spirited and melancholy, [his work is] an apt answer to war- haunted times." -- Village Voice on Sun Sheets and Small Shoes

A layered look at the breaking point of matter and motion, La Sonnambula presents an amalgam of puppets, contraptions and choreography that delves into the eventual reduction of everything to nothing.  The work originates with the arias from Bellini's mysterious opera by the same name, following a soprano's voice through the nebulous world that separates human from object, living from lifeless.

Michael Bodel is interested in the moment that mechanisms, organisms and sound break down, becoming once again their basic elements: scraps, cells, faint echoes.  For machines, this is the moment when the cog comes loose and the metal parts clang to the floor.  For humans it is a more subtle moment when we lose control over the millions of molecules making up our body. For sound it is the measure where the vibrato swells into instability and the voice finally cracks.

This piece is a collaboration with opera singer, Casey Cole, whose solo performance will drive the imagery. The themes of  ambiguity and transformation that are explored in the puppetry resurface in moments  extracted from the Bellini’s opera.  A lone woman wanders through a world that is simultaneously human and fantastic; we follow the pathways she traces when her mind is dead and her body alive, and eventually, the shocking sadness that overwhelms her when she wakes up.

MORE INFO: www.mbodel.net
 

I aim to develop a work that collapses the distinction between inanimate objects and the human body.  I am interested in the moment that mechanisms, organisms and sound break down, becoming once again their basic elements: scraps, cells, faint echoes.  For machines, this is the moment when the cog comes loose and the metal parts clang to the floor.  For humans it is a more subtle moment when we lose control over the millions of molecules making up our body.  For sound it is the measure where the vibrato swells into instability and the voice finally cracks.  This piece will explore destruction not as a violent or tragic event, but rather as an inevitable shift of states: a reduction of human to matter. This idea will resonate alongside the opposite theme of a physical object endowed with life and humanity, a theme innate to puppetry.

Michael Bodel creates work at the intersection of dance and puppetry, fusing 
human movement with image theater of all scales.

He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2003 with Honors in Dance and a double major in Astronomy.  He is interested in using choreography to explore scientific themes as they relate to our human experience.  This idea paved the way for his rod puppet piece Baade by the Window (2004) following the life of a German astronomer working in the States during World War II, and Mrs. Hodges Was Struck by a Meteorite (2006), which investigated the probability of chance collisions.

Michael is also drawn to site-specific work and the ability that dance on camera has to transport an audience to any location. His recent films include Night Wine, set on a family vineyard in New Jersey, and Ios which follows three tourists in the Greek Isles on their hunt for the perfect beach.

His learning and inspiration as a puppeteer began over several summers at the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont and continued while working for Amy Trompetter on The Happy Prince. Michael is also a regular featured artist in Parade the Circle at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he has been greatly influenced by the finely articulated large-scale puppets of carnival designers. Michael's work has been shown at HERE, 3-Legged Dog, Galapagos, Judson Church, The Philly Fringe Festival, The Dance Moving Forward Festival in Los Angeles, and The Criterion Theater in Bar Harbor, ME.  He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.