Michael Bodel | Sonnambula
2010 Swing Space Resident, 14 Wall Street, Vault
Photo: Carl Skutsch
Michael Bodel creates work at the intersection of dance and puppetry with an ever-changing group of collaborators. He is in his third year as a Resident Artist at HERE, where he is developing Sonnambula in collaboration with soprano Casey Cole. His original work includes Sun Sheets and Small Shoes at HERE (2007): a dance for four women, eight bed sheets and forty baby shoes; Mrs. Hodges Was Struck by a Meteorite at 3-legged Dog (2006), which investigates the probability of love and chance collisions; and co-direction of Courtyard at the Dance Moving Forward Festival (Los Angeles, 2004). His work has also been shown at the Dance Now Festival, the Criterion Theater (Bar Harbor, ME) & Judson Church. He is currently lucky enough to be working with dancers Liz Beres, Nicholas Bruder, Cheri Paige Fogleman, Hannah Lillevoie, & Kristin Swiat. He graduated from Wesleyan University with honors in Dance in 2003 and is a Masters candidate at Hollins University at the American Dance Festival.
Bodel will be developing his new performance, Sonnambula, during his Swing Space Residency. Bellini's pastoral opera, La Sonnambula is peeled back to reveal the experience of the sleepwalker, Amina, surrounded by her village but lost in her own mind. Visceral choreography converges with puppetry on multiple scales. Amina's world decomposes. Soprano Mme. Giuditta Pasta, is brought to life, moments before she steps onto the stage of La Scala, 1831.
