Introduction: Editor's Collection on Sarah Michelson

Sarah Michelson’s nowhere, currently on exhibit for 7 hours a day nearly every day of the week at the MoMA, features a rotating cast of dancers and explores Michelson’s forever-question: what is dance? Those who have seen the work do not come away with an answer. When sharing our opinions on the performance, the MRPJ editor’s room could only agree that we needed to see it a second (third, fourth) time to feel digested.

Writer/performer Buck Wanner felt similarly about Michelson’s Devotion, a “first enactment” of the creation story. “Taking Responsibility for Time” by Buck Wanner is the first piece of this reader and grapples with his experience seeing the original run of Devotion in 2011. Together, he and Michelson explore the act of rigorous, repetitive performance as devotion—the commitment of time to a work, and said time as circular and palimpsestic.

In the second piece, “Notes On Devotion”, John Hoobyar further unfolds the concept of devotion and how it relates to dance performance by investigating the evolution and ostensible demise of his own performance career [though, you can catch him somersaulting through nowhere]. Hoobyar began his relationship with Michelson by walking out of her audition just before becoming one of her most devoted dancers. In “Notes,” we follow him as he releases ego and discovers dance for the sake of the “integrity of the movement.”

The final part of this reader is Michelson’s own writing, a 30-year-old article titled “In The House Of God” from the MRPJ’s 13th issue. Here, Michelson details her gradual abandonment of her “belief in” and perpetual rushing towards the future, instead turning to a belief in and embrace of stagnancy, rest, and her present self. She writes:

The forward linear has seemed eternally to be a source of trouble. All along I have been holding my breath, waiting to turn the page… I thought dancing would get me faster from one place to the next. I thought I had far to go. I should have laid down right then. I could have worshiped my home right then.

What about Michelson has dancers flocking to her? What gives them such “all-encompassing spiritual fulfillment” (Hoobyar)? What evokes their devotion? Read this reader for the beginnings of an answer—once, and then maybe a second (third, fourth) time.