Might this watery adventure be an entry point to ultimate liberation? Dana Michel shakes off her fear of water in an iconic community pool in the Bergen suburbs.
Before moving into a former pool, BIT presents a performance in one that’s still filled with water. YOU CANNOT CAN, is a new solo performance for swimming pools by choreographer and dancer Dana Michel. Surrounded by the audience, Michel wades around global histories and socio-economic realities of swimming and safe access to water.
Dana Michel is a live artist whose works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, choreography, sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary to create a centrifuge of experience. In YOU CANNOT CAN she investigates the ability to swim as one of the ways in which we might embody self-trust. She wonders why, despite many attempts at learning, she still cannot feel at ease in the water. And what is it that holds back the majority of her family from swimming, despite hailing from an island that is surrounded by both the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea?
How safe can you feel in the world if you cannot float in the liquid that makes up a large part of your body? In YOU CANNOT CAN Dana Michel uses her signature kaleidoscopically-curious approach to focus on how we might shake off our fears.
