About this performance

CUTLASS SPRING

Inching towards decensorship, engaging the infinite potential of everyday objects, CUTLASS SPRING is, at once, a manifesto and a heated reflection, an ethnography of sexual understanding and an archaeology of desire.

"I’ve always been obsessed with...“sex stuff”. My much older sister majored in Psychology in University, and so I spent my childhood often sneakily pouring over her textbooks, always particularly fascinated with her human sexuality textbooks. These memories came oozing back this past year when my ve- year old started receiving special sexual education workshops at his daycare. It made me think that it was time to renew my own sex ed knowledge.

While i work with the body and movement in my work as a live artist, I have noticed an increasing disconnection with myself as a sexual being over the past 20 years. This widening ssure has stricken me as particularly troubling as i have always had a particularly keen interest in sexual investigation and a somewhat latent (and admittedly giggly!) interest in becoming a sexologist. In my past two works, I have to some extent been exploring the idea of repression - how I had been repressing certain aspects of my cultural identity and the repercussions of this kind of withholding. Moving further towards uncovering buried facets of my human composition, I would now like to delve into what has become the mystery of my sexual self and how it affects me as a human, a performer, a mother, a lover.

A couple of major questions, for instance:
How does a lifetime of hiding affect how we connect to others?
What are the effects of repression on how one loves, how one shares physical space with others, and how one shares their body with others?"

– Dana Michel