Michael Bodel 

Part of the Dream Music Puppetry Program

 
Bellini's pastoral opera, La Sonnambula is peeled back to reveal the experience of young Amina on the day before her wedding, surrounded by her village but lost in her own mind. A sleepwalker, Amina exists in the space between sleeping and wakimg, vibrant and lifeless. Visceral choreography of two dancers 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.

 

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Listen to Michael Bodel and Casey Cole discussing their work Sonnambula

 

 

 

Help Support Sonnambula

 Sonnambula is made possible by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space program; space at 14 Wall Street is donated by Capstone Equities.

I find the collision of science and human experience is fertile ground for creative exploration. In many ways I view art as a science, one that encompasses both the general and the individual. Physicists and biologists investigate the detail of our world and develop languages to describe them. Artists also explore aspects of this world: sequences of events, disparate connections, fundamental natures and transient moments. With each project an artist constructs a new language of imagery. While science aims at objectivity, it can only speaks in generalities, and that is where I feel art picks up. Performance can explore the most intricate specifics of life — the details of an individual face, a specific moment in time, or the complexities of one person’s experience — and yet these actions on stage can somehow allegorically convey the most universal truths. The smallest image can enter an audience member and come to signify something larger, personal, and vital.

For me, the image is paramount. It is the building block as well as the feeding trough for an audience’s imagination. I spend most of my energy arranging images: chronologically with transitions and transformations, and spacially with layering. I like the contrast that comes when working in various sizes: from miniature to human to large-scale. What draws me to puppetry is this ability to shift perspectives by redefining space.  It can also provides incredible meta-structures of images within images and worlds that folding into themselves.

Michael Bodel creates work at the intersection of dance and puppetry, fusing 
human movement with image theater of all scales.

He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2003 with Honors in Dance and a double major in Astronomy.  He is interested in using choreography to explore scientific themes as they relate to our human experience.  This idea paved the way for his rod puppet piece Baade by the Window (2004) following the life of a German astronomer working in the States during World War II, and Mrs. Hodges Was Struck by a Meteorite (2006), which investigated the probability of chance collisions.

Michael is also drawn to site-specific work and the ability that dance on camera has to transport an audience to any location. His recent films include Night Wine, set on a family vineyard in New Jersey, and Ios which follows three tourists in the Greek Isles on their hunt for the perfect beach.

His learning and inspiration as a puppeteer began over several summers at the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont and continued while working for Amy Trompetter on The Happy Prince. Michael is also a regular featured artist in Parade the Circle at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he has been greatly influenced by the finely articulated large-scale puppets of carnival designers. Michael's work has been shown at HERE, 3-Legged Dog, Galapagos, Judson Church, The Philly Fringe Festival, The Dance Moving Forward Festival in Los Angeles, and The Criterion Theater in Bar Harbor, ME.  He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.