“Never conform,” says acclaimed choreographer Mia Michaels. “Define yourself. The world worships the original.” Part of the success of Michaels’s work is her ability to find and develop the essence of every performer and fuse it with her own style of contemporary dance. The tension and power of her choreography, full of leaps and throws, inspires the belief that people can do anything, even fly. Her expressive animation of the whole body from gracefully extended, twisting fingers to powerfully flexed, stomping feet creates stories that can be at once joyfully uninhibited and emotionally complex.
Best known as a choreographer and judge on multiple seasons of the television dance competition “So You Think You Can Dance,” Michaels’s brand of contemporary movement reflects her own passionate, creative, and tenacious personality.
Michaels comes from a family of dancers and fell in love with the art at a young age; she recalls keeping time with her bottle while still in diapers at her father’s dance studio. A choreographer in the making since the age of two and an unabashed defender of individuality, Michaels’s work has grown from her bottle-bopping days to a multi-faceted, award-winning career including work with pop icons, dance companies, and educational institutions on concerts, stage shows, television commercials, and feature films like the recent stage-to-screen adaptation of Rock of Ages starring Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, and Julianne Hough.
Michaels developed her artistry with her New York-based company R.A.W. (Reality At Work), where she acquired her signature artistic vocabulary. This work led her to choreograph Madonna’s “Drowned World Tour” and Céline Dion’s “A New Day” concert, directed by Franco Dragone, with whom she would later collaborate on Cirque du Soleil’s Delirium. “A New Day” played a sold-out run for five years at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and earned Michaels the recognition that brought her to her Emmy Award-winning stint on “So You Think You Can Dance.” The tension in Michaels’s style between unbridled artistic expression and grounded humanity complements J. M. Barrie’s journey in Finding Neverland.
Brenna Nicely is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
