Michelle Boulé in Body Duet by John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre:
‘Sometimes jarring, sometimes synchronized, Boulé and Connaughton are the utmost combination of athlete and artist, delivering riveting performances with grace and prowess. Never appearing to struggle, both performers are sensational, with movements strong, pronounced and purposeful; Boulé’s Bessie Award is fully justified in this performance alone.’
-David O’Shaughnessy for entertainment.ie
‘And what performances. Connaughton ranges from aggressive, flailing movement to side-splitting multidimensional caricature, while Boulé maintains a concentrated intensity throughout the hour with an ability to change from absurdly comic to absurdly tragic within a moment.’
-Michael Seaver for Irish Theatre Magazine
-Seona Mac Réamoinn for The Irish Times
Michelle Boulé interview by Lauren Bakst for BOMBLOG for her piece Hello, I need you at The Kitchen
Michelle Boulé in Bascule by David Wampach:
‘If it weren’t for the compulsive charisma of dancers Michelle Boulé and Liz Santoro, I might have beat my head against a wall. But there they were, making me watch them do the same thing over and over again. Change. Again. Etc. There’s a fine line between insipid and inspired, but this one made the list, so Wampach obviously played it well, right?’
-David Velasco, Artforum, DANCE Best of 2010
Michelle Boulé interview by Samara Davis for Bomb Magazine
Michelle Boulé in Last Meadow by Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People:
‘Michelle Boulé who does a gender bending turn as James Dean is just knock out… It’s one of the most phenomenal performances I saw last year.’
-Claudia La Rocco WNYC Weekend Edition, minute 4:20-5:10
‘His undeniable star was the stellar dancer Michelle Boulé, whose haunting portrayal of James Dean showed her to be every inch an actor as well and just might have been the revelation of the year.’
-Claudia La Rocco, NY Times Critics Best of 2009 picks
‘the amazing Michelle Boulé in a tour de force performance’
-Susan Yung, Thirteen Sunday Arts Blog
‘Boulé, a diminutive powerhouse…’
-Kelly Clarke, Willamette Week
‘Easily the best thing about the performance is Boulé’s mimicry of James Dean. The show begins with a drunken monologue from Giant as Jet the troubled oil tycoon mumbles a banquet speech in an empty room, slobbering through a tangled litany of defiance and remorse. Boulé’s body almost seems to be inhabited by Dean—she’s easy in his looseness and slouch—and, when we see her moments later as the shy Cal from Rebel Without a Cause, her puppy dog eyes and hunched shoulders are an uncanny copy of the singular actor.
Boulé is a good focal point for Last Meadow. It’s easy to cling to her as the action becomes more chaotic and diffuse, breaking down time and time again.’
-Patrick Alan Coleman, The Portland Mercury
-Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice ‘Miguel Gutierrez Goes to the Movies…’
-Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Dance Magazine ‘Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People’
-Michelle Boulé and Tarek Halaby on Last Meadow, Critical Correspondence Interview with Abigail Crain
Michelle Boulé in If I Sing To You by Deborah Hay Dance Company (William Forsythe Commission):
‘Hay’s choreography depends heavily on her individual dancers, and the five performers (Michelle Boulé, Jeanine Durning, Catherine Legrand, Amelia Reeber, and Ros Warby) deliver. Their adroit bodies – most notably Boulé’s strangely magical naïveté – opened up an uncanny space between experience and consciousness.’
-Hong-An Truong, Idiom Mag
‘In shorts and sweater vest, her black hair endearingly tufted and her eyes like saucers, the magically astute Michelle Boulé had the affect of a transgender child on his first day of school and a physicality somewhat like Leonardo DiCaprio as the mentally challenged boy in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”
…Ms. Hay’s dances depend, more than most, on their dancers, [who] captivate on the minute-to-minute scale the choreography demands. Through virtuosos like Ms. Durning, Ms. Boulé and Ms. Warby you see how Ms. Hay, who in the 1960s helped revolutionize dance in part through pedestrian movement, is now using the everyday as a vocabulary and exploding it, making it at once more familiar and utterly strange.’
-Claudia La Rocco, NY Times
Critical Correspondence Interview with Rebecca Davis
Michelle Boulé in Everyone by Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People
‘While their foreplay becomes greedier, Boulé starts to talk to us, loudly and clearly, musing about the passing of time in a creative life (“Oh, how many bad poems will I write this year?”). She reminds us that “we are in this place together” and says, “This is the last piece I made for you, yes. . .one down, so many more to go.” The words were written by Gutierrez, but Boulé owns them here and now. As she punctuates the speech with yesses and nos, she’s as passionate with her (his) thoughts as the couples are with their bodies. The scene is strangely moving. Fierce as she is, I’d like to go up and put my arms around her.’
-Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice
