Past Event: Slow Dancing

“There is a celestial harp: this human harp is a likeness of it.”   - Sankhyayana Aranyaka, VIII, 9

This project had a long gestation period before coming to fruition several years ago. It’s not always easy to point to the specific factors that bring a new work, or the impulse to create one, into being. The overlapping issues, passions, and fascinations that merge with willingness, opportunity, and aptitude are not always obvious.

One impulse was clear. I love dance. I love watching it. I love what dancers do, who they are, and what they stand for. Dance is an underappreciated art form—the NEA tells us that only eight percent of the U.S. population will ever see a live dance performance. This led me to the idea of making a visual statement centered on celebrating dance — but not limited to any one kind of dance—to try to capture the “essence” of dance in a different medium.

A second impulse was my natural urge to make portraits. The best portraits teach me how to look longer and harder and deeper at my fellow human beings. As a portrait artist, this is what I strive to do. I could make a portrait of anyone, anywhere and be happy doing so, but there is a certain pleasure in having dancers as one’s subject.

Common to almost every work I undertake is the desire to engage the beautiful, to spark people’s creative imagination, and to fill them with a sense of wonder and even love. So much of what I’m ultimately interested in is the sacred potential of art—work that not merely beautifies but also beatifies.

William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason—to give witness to splendor. This is also why, I think, dancers dance. Susan Sontag once pointed out that “no art lends itself so aptly as dance does to metaphors borrowed from the spiritual life (grace, elevation)….” But I also believe that certain harder and rougher metaphors borrowed from the life here below (gravity, striving, failing, falling) are equally important to what dance is and who dancers are. To paraphrase Simone Weil, grace is also the law of the descending movement—some people fall to the heights.

I am not a dancer, though I am married to one—Wendy Whelan. Having this exceptional woman and great artist by my side has been, and continues to be, one of the greatest privileges of my life. Knowing her and witnessing the intertwining splendor of her life and work has influenced my own in ways that are both the easiest and the most difficult to speak about.     —David Michalek 

David Michalek takes the concept and techniques of portraiture as the starting points for the creation of compelling works, on both a large and small scale, in a range of mediums. He has been drawn in particular to projects that bring together diverse groups of people in settings ranging from galleries to public spaces, churches and community organizations to health care facilities. Born in San Francisco in 1967, Michalek earned a B.A. in English Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1990 and also studied filmmaking at New York University. He worked as an assistant to noted photographer Herb Ritts for two years, beginning in 1989. In 1991 he began his professional photographic career and worked regularly as a portrait artist for publications such as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Vogue. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Michalek began experimenting with performance and installation and developing large-scale, multidimensional projects. His solo and collaborative work has been shown nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Yale University, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Kitchen. He has collaborated with director Peter Sellars on two staged works: Kafka Fragments, presented at Carnegie Hall, and St. François d’Assise, presented at the Salzburg Festival and Paris Opera. Other film and video work for theater includes collaborations with the Tallis Scholars; John Malpede and L.A.P.D. on three works, Agents and Assets, The Skid Row Museum, and RFK in EKY; and the Brooklyn Philharmonic in a project for the Brooklyn Museum’s “Music Off the Walls” series. His critically acclaimed 14 Stations was a project created in collaboration with men and women transitioning out of homelessness, participating in the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. It was modeled on the traditional Christian devotional rite, the Stations of the Cross, with a different man or woman assuming the role of the Christ figure in each. Michalek has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, from, among others, The Franklin Furnace, The Durfee Foundation, The California State Arts Council, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, Karen-Weiss Foundation, and the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County (commissioning grant toward the creation of Slow Dancing). He has been an artist in residence with the World Performance Project at Yale University since the spring of 2007. He has also been on the visiting faculty of the Yale Divinity School, lecturing on religion and the arts.

Key grip Jason Amos

Production manager Alisha Borth

Lighting supervisor Bob Bushfield

Production fundraising Lordes Lopez

Production assistant Chris Martin

High-speed photography supervisor Jim Matlosz

Production stills Matthew Waken

High-speed camera technician Gregory Wilson

Costume, post-production, digital arts Karen Young

Technical director, post-production supervisor Axel Ericson

Post-production Manu Sawkar

Tour management Jessica Cabrera

Worldwide representation Sunny Artist Management, Ilter Ibrahimof, ilter@sunnyartistmanagement.com

Acknowledgements

David Michalek extends his deepest gratitude to each artist that participated in this project.

Special thanks to the Michalek family, Renae Williams, Brian Quandt, Rick Robinson, Vision Research, Tony Lucatorto, Jim Borth, Josh Weisberg, Siobhan Burns, Tom Halligan, Randall Bourscheidt, Ilter Ibrahimof, Art Lavis, Duke Dang, Mary Sharp-Cronson, Judith Dupre, Susan Dupre, Donna Karan, William Wright, Earl Mack, Wendy Perron, Anne Pasternak, Robert Weisenthal, Michael Byars, Barry Friedberg and Charlotte Moss, Randy Ballsmeyer, Tyra Hanshaw, William Wegman, Picture Ray Studios, Peter Sellars, Emily Macel, Aiden Mooney, Lynn Zekanis, Christoper Anderson-Bazolli, Stephanie French, Martha Wilson, and the Franklin Furnace.