Michelle Boulé: HOLISTIC
“To heal means “to make whole,” and I’m forever curious about this place of wholeness, that exists beyond duality and our value judgments of right and wrong or good and bad. ”
Summer 2023 Artist-in-Residence at
Moon Randolph Homestead
Michelle Boulé: Tunic by Katrin Schnabl
How would you describe your work?
Getting injured at 16 years old and being told my body wasn’t fit for dancing (and that I needed to quit) led me down a path of holistic healing that continues to shape my work as an artist to this day. It’s actually my M.O. for life!
All of my work springs from questions of how art can be a vehicle for healing through an aestheticized lens, which might involve shock, humor, or trickery, or attempts to create experiences that remind us of the profound beauty available to us in absolutely everything, when we surrender to it. To heal means “to make whole,” and I’m forever curious about this place of wholeness, that exists beyond duality and our value judgments of right and wrong or good and bad. Embodying that experience as a dancer feels like my life’s work, challenge, gift, and privilege.
Michelle Boulé performing at Westside Theater in Missoula, MT
How was your experience as an Open AIR Artist-in-Residence?
I loved my Open AIR residency. I can always look back in hindsight and say I wish I would have done “more” of this or that, but I am so satisfied with the site-specific work I created while at Moon-Randolph Homestead and the support I received from the Open AIR team and my artist cohort.
Dancing in non-traditional settings has interested me since at least 2013, when I premiered a dance in the raw “gallery spaces” of Industry City in Brooklyn, New York as part of a 100,000 square-foot art show called “Come Together: Surviving Sandy.” The last piece I choreographed in New York in 2018 took place in Triple Canopy’s Canal Street office space. And I felt even more at home dancing in the field last summer at Moon-Randolph, with the unpredictable natural elements–the grass, sky, rain, bugs, and birds–joining as co-creators in the choreography.
Michelle Boulé performing at Moon-Randolph Homestead during her Open AIR Residency
What was your research process during this time?
My Open AIR residency was a “homecoming” of sorts. During much of the pandemic, I was focused almost exclusively on growing my coaching/healing business. I had left NY in January 2020 before the pandemic, knowing that I needed a new home that would allow me to commune more deeply and effortlessly with nature. By August of 2020, after repeated canceled artist residencies and travel plans disrupted my nomadic existence, Montana became that home. My Open AIR residency was a much-needed opportunity to return to the heart of my artistic practice after a nearly 3 year pause.
I spent time reading in the grass, swatting away mosquitoes, attempting Feldenkrais (a somatic-based movement practice) exercises on top of a picnic table. Eventually, the open field at Moon-Randolph kept calling me, and I created a simple improvised score and framework that grew into the movement and sonic experience I created with my sound designer Curtis Tamm for my final presentation.
While I wanted to return to the “work” of my practice, I also wanted people to experience rest and the intrinsic choreography of the natural world that we experience when we’re quiet enough to observe and listen. The section with the blankets became one of the most surprising and challenging moments in the piece. I shared a story with Curtis that I had just heard about how buffalo wallow and it was a great synchronicity that he actually had field recordings of buffalo sounds that were perfect for that section.
Wildly tossing myself around with a blanket overhead while retreating backward up the field and then heaving multiple blankets and sheets over my head and shoulders to spread across the field was exhausting. (I don’t know if I’ve made a piece yet where there isn’t some sort of physical struggle!) However, the rest offered to everyone afterward, with the invitation to enter the field and lie down on a blanket in silence, was so satisfying. The choreography was no longer about anything I was doing, but rather about simply existence itself.
“White Hair” by Michelle Boulé
Do you create any work specifically for social media?
Yes! In 2018 for my 41st birthday, I decided to make a daily improvised movement video for social media for 41 consecutive days following a movement score I called “moving backwards (literally) through (subjective) cycles of completion.” During those 41 days, I created videos in Bali, Korea, Santa Fe, rural Illinois, and Brooklyn. My phone tripod literally broke as soon as I finished recording the final video. These are still up on my Instagram account, and there’s a summary on my Vimeo channel. There was a lot of satisfaction in being able to reach more people across the globe who would normally never see my dancing in person, although I don’t think it replaces a live experience.
Since then, I’ve used the hashtag #honoryourinnercreator to create movement videos (sometimes for 60+ day challenges for myself) that also incorporate some of what I teach in my coaching practice. The hashtag is meant to encourage people to know that we all have a powerful creative aspect within us that keeps us sane and makes the world a better place when we honor it, lovingly. I wrote about this in an article for Arts Missoula called “Everyone is an artist.”
The Field, 2018
What are you up to now (post Open AIR)?
I’m in the very early stages of research for a short film project with Curtis Tamm and director and drone cinematographer Shu Zhu, that we hope to shoot in Montana in 2025. We’re still building support to make that happen.
I’m also brainstorming on a project with another music collaborator, NY-based saxophonist Caroline Davis. She and I did a great (in my opinion!) impromptu show at the Westside Theater in Missoula in March 2023, which launched our interest to keep working together. I’m also working with Singaporean, Minneapolis-based choreographer Val Oliveiro on a project for 2026, about “queer” relationships to Asian identity and identity in general. In June 2024, I’ll be performing in NYC with choreographer Bebe Miller.
I was graced with an invitation to choreograph a piece for the University of Montana last fall called TOUCHDOWN, which will be performed again at the American College Dance Association conference in Utah this March and in a benefit concert here in Missoula on February 9-10.
In short, my Open AIR residency did help launch this next phase of my professional creative life, and I am so grateful!
I continue to run and love my coaching + healing business, with monthly online meetings through my “Brilliant Creatives Community”, a retreat called The Extraordinary Artist at Dancing Spirit Ranch in May, private coaching, and speaking and teaching gigs.
Audience at rest during Michelle Boulé’s Artist Presentation at Moon-Randolph Homestead
Visit Michelle Boulé’s website and follow on Instagram @Michelle.boule
