Michelle Sui: Reimagining Boundaries, Archetypes, and Performance

Michelle Sui (last name pronounced “sway”) is a question. 

Talented in many artistic arenas — ballet, voice, and choreography, to name a few — Michelle Sui balances the hats. As per their website, Michelle’s work is highly intersectional, where film, opera, and dance (again, to name a few) meet. 

When I first searched for Michelle on Instagram, it was the first profile that popped up. And at the top right corner of their website, alongside an Instagram logo, is a Vimeo link of equal importance. 

This is because the visual and the sonic take prominence in their art. Take Flower Score, in which nebulous lights and intercut takes weave with recheré flowers to Michelle’s harmony of voices.

My favorites among their Vimeo profile are music videos they’ve choreographed: “Heat Keeps Rising” by Lea Thomas and “JFK” by Deep Gold — pieces, which, in my opinion, are soft and yet-to-be-seen gems. 

Seaweeds by Michelle Sui, a live performance at Bread & Salt this month of November on the 21st, reimagines an otherwise lost ending to the 1922 silent film The Toll of the Sea. The film makes a tragic turn in the implication that the protagonist takes her own life because the man she loves never made her a priority. In Sui’s performance, actors audition for Wong, the original actress, and she breaks free from the script, in search of her on-again, off-again girlfriend. Pay-what-you-can tickets are now available online in addition to a trailer of Sui’s upcoming performance.

Michelle Sui is a question: difficult to categorize. And maybe that’s the beauty of it — the resistance of labels, crumbling of boundaries, and subverted archetypes.