Uncanny Valley Stuff: A Review

Lying under a white tarp, choreographer Dana Michel then pulls it off of her, appearing disoriented, as though waking. She seems frustrated, angry even, hitting the tarp as though an inanimate object could be held responsible for anything. Talking to herself, her speech is at first unintelligible. Soon we can make out the words “cream and milk,” though in their sentence-less isolation it remains unclear what of this cream and milk. Through these accumulations of quiet yet powerful images, Michel makes black stereotypes emerge, in this case flirting with homelessness and mental illness.

Uncanny Valley Stuff, photo by Maxyme G. Delisle

She then unzips the door of a black tent just big enough for one upright person and makes her way in, standing behind a podium that takes up most of the space. In a surprising display of thriftiness, she uses the clips from a hanger for pants to keep the door open. “Butter!” she blurts out into the microphone, apparently still on her dairy rant. Uncanny Valley Stuff becomes hilarious as stereotypes become confused, slide into each other, and such importance is unexpectedly bestowed upon something as trifling as butter. She takes it even further by sliding white gloves on and holding her hands up to the heavens, recalling a preacher and his faithful churchgoers as she implores, “Come, milkshake, come!”

Throughout the twenty-minute piece, Michel is making subtle but clever use of sound. When she is kneading dough, a microphone is lying by her side so that the unnecessarily heightened sound of a flour sifter becomes strangely funny in and of itself. By building on these images to the point where they bleed into one another, Michel reveals the absurdity of stereotypes as they coexist and contradict themselves, showing us that the lens through which we view the world is nothing more than a fun house mirror.

October 24 & 25 at 7:30pm
Usine C
www.usine-c.com
514.521.4493
Tickets: 10$