VDA 2025 Artist in Residence
Michael Bodel:
The Institute for Folding
A cardboard choreography of human knowledge, neglect and wonder.
The Work:
The Institute for Folding is an interdisciplinary dance work in layers, literally. Through movement, language, live sound, and 30 sheets of cardboard, the work unpeels our human relationship to knowledge—our drive for scientific understanding, the ebb and flow of our ignorance, and our current disregard for what has been discovered.
This is a dance for our precipitous moment when adult trust in knowledge (such knowledge) has faltered and we have lost the collective wonder (such wonder) that once filled the eyes of our children and early civilizations. And it lasts about an hour.
This work will be premiered in the summer of 2025. Please stay tuned for tour dates as they are scheduled. Would you like to host this work at your venue, or otherwise support the residency program?
Photo by Swoyer Photography
About Michael:
Michael makes interdisciplinary dance works. Many integrate objects, place and sensorial stuff. His process involves wide-ranging research and both serious and silly play. And collaborators vary from project to project. Michael’s past works have included dances choreographed to oral histories of immigration, a pageant set in an apple orchard, and a dance iteration of Foucault’s Corps Utopique. Prior to The Institute for Folding, he created a dance project centered on grain—how it is sown, gathered, cared, hoarded and lost.
He is honored to sit (and move) on the board of advisors of The Field Center in Rockingham, VT, and has served on the board of the Society of Dance History Scholars (now Dance Studies Association). He fancies writing about historical pageantry and embodied cognition, and works daily as the Director of External Affairs at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth. Michael lives with his family in the fields of Putney, VT.
Join the Process:
This dance project is being developed in layers, and one of those is a series of choreographic devising labs. If you are a dance artist, theater-maker, puppeteer or designer willing to lend a few creative hours to explore, ideate, move through, delaminate and reconstruct the history of human knowledge. Or you just like cardboard, use the form below to be added to our interest list. We’ll be planning a few sessions throughout the winter and throughout the state, and we’ll be in touch.