This is the UK première of a three-hour, durational performance by a Montreal-based dancer and choreographer, Dana Michel. It’s a piece about work which she performs in art galleries, in this case the Iron House in Birmingham. In it, she takes on the role of Mike, loosely based on her father, who worked as a janitor in a hospital.
A crowd of maybe seventy or eighty people wait outside the gallery, and we are let in at 2PM. There are a few chairs in the gallery and a table by the door piled high with rolled-up blankets, which we can take to sit on. The Iron House is a repurposed industrial space with redbrick walls and a stone floor. Whatever the permanent exhibition is has been removed, and the gallery walls are bare. In their place, various work-related objects have been set in different parts of the gallery, including a briefcase, a plastic lunchbox and safety helmet, some orange extension leads, rolls of paper and carpet and some blinds waiting to be fitted.
Dana Michel enters at 2:15PM. She is dressed in matching brown trousers and waistcoat with a long-sleeved white T-shirt and white socks which are too long for her and flop around as she walks. She has ear defenders perched on top of her head and she is kicking a small metal case in front of her. Over the next three hours, she will neither speak nor smile as she carries out various tasks with a clown-like, silent movie seriousness of purpose.
This is not drama, it’s performance art, or Live Art, like Cornelia Parker’s The Maybe, in which Tilda Swinton slept in a glass cabinet, or the work of Marina Abramovic and Gilbert and George. Like any other work of art, MIKE is something to look at, think about and reflect on. It’s a bit representational, a bit abstract but, crucially, it happens in an art gallery, not in a theatre.
That thought helped me get through three hours in which not a lot happens. Early on, Michel pops in and out of the toilet a few times and cleans her teeth. She moves a heat lamp from one room to another, she fills a water jug from a water cooler and then she sits down for a while. At one point, she goes outside and discovers the sun is shining. She takes the water jug outside and empties it over her head, then she comes back in to dry her hair under the heat lamp. She goes outside a few more times, but then it starts to rain so she stays indoors. She moves pieces of furniture around and does a little dance. She discovers the plastic garden chairs make an interesting scraping noise if she shuffles across the floor on them so she does that for a bit. Then she unrolls a big sheet of brown paper and wraps things up in it. At one point, she cuts the paper with a vicious-looking machete. It might be a metaphor for knife crime, but then again it might not.
At the start, we all try to follow her as she moves around the gallery, but there are too many of us so no-one can see everything. By the one-hour mark, about half of the attendees have left and the rest of us are letting it happen around us while we check our phones or have a chat. Two hours in, and we are like negligent childminders, we have some sense of where she is and what she’s doing but whatever it is, she’ll be back soon so there’s no need to go looking for her.
The piece seems to have a structure, it’s A Day In The Life Of Mike, but each individual section within it felt improvised. She is aware we occupy the same space as her, but her movement has the unselfconsciousness of someone who is unobserved, a bit like watching a participant on a reality TV show. Sometimes, she stands next to someone and mimics them, occasionally she writes a note on a piece of paper and gives it to one of us.
The way I read it was that she acted in the same way that someone doing a genuine, menial job would act but, whereas the millions of people who do low paid, unskilled work are invisible, she can do exactly the same things but we pay attention to her because it is art. It’s a Marxist critique of alienated labour in which she performs an endless succession of time-consuming but unproductive tasks. The duration is important, as it puts the audience through a similar experience to Mike in the piece: getting sleepy and bored, checking the time to see how long it will be before we can go home, perking up when something out of the ordinary happens. Artificial Intelligence might do the rest of out of us a job in our knowledge-based, post-industrial society, but we’ll still need people to do the cleaning and maintenance, and their status and conditions will keep getting worse.
A few people drift back in for the last half an hour. At this point, Michel is wrapping an office chair in brown paper before putting it, and herself, into a big cardboard box. At exactly 5PM, she speaks for the first time, “it’s five, yes? It’s five,” and the show is over.