Sarah Michelson’s Delicate Fetish Play
Sarah Michelson presents a 25-day durational performance work at MoMA’s atrium running through October 11, 2026, exploring the economics and materiality of a lifetime spent in dance collaboration. The piece functions as a dense self-referential accumulation, recycling objects, projections, and performers from Michelson’s prior works across two decades, including fragments from her 2014 Whitney Biennial piece and 2012 MoMA performance. Dancers carry branded duffel bags inscribed ‘Dance | Debt,’ literalizing precarity within a highly stylized environment. Notable elements include large silver sculptures of female dancers—modernist reinterpretations of Degas ballerinas—manipulated by performers and adorned with provocative language addressing the historical sexualization of dancers. The work incorporates sound design, projected imagery, and Michelson herself performing repetitive, visceral movement against environmental interventions. Rather than presenting formally novel choreography, the piece operates as meta-commentary on artistic collaboration and institutional memory, deliberately interrogating its own self-cannibalization and the material conditions sustaining contemporary dance practice.
Original article published on Hyperallergic — AI-generated summary. Visit the website to read the full article at the source. Image via Hyperallergic.
