When Michael Bodel first thought to incorporate cardboard into his new dance work, he envisioned 4-by-8-foot slabs, but they wouldn’t fit in his car. To transport them, the choreographer cut the length by two feet, which ended up being the ideal size for the dancers.
They had to get comfortable interacting with the material during rehearsals, which were already challenging to coordinate because the collaborators lived about two hours apart. “It’s even harder when you’re trying to schlep 20 sheets of cardboard around,” said Bodel, who lives in Westminster West. “And I just know from experience we can’t rehearse without the cardboard.”
The paper product is no mere prop: In the resulting project, The Institute for Folding, three dancers move around and entwine with three-ply cardboard — two sheets sandwiching a corrugated center — to represent the layers of knowledge that have shaped humans’ historical understanding of the world and intellectual evolution, Bodel said. A series of five performances around the state kicks off on Wednesday, September 17, at Middlebury College.
Through a yearlong residency with Vermont Dance Alliance, Bodel developed the work in collaboration with Burlington dancers and co-choreographers Caitlin Morgan and Hanna Satterlee.
“There’s more disbelief about facts that we’ve understood for years, and that’s alarming.”
Michael Bodel
Unusual and sometimes hard-to-manage objects are a cornerstone of Bodel’s work. He has integrated large puppets, bags of grain and even aromas into his dances.
“When you bring objects into a room, there’s just so many potential avenues for discovery,” said Bodel, 44, who works as director of external affairs for Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. “Any object comes with so much metaphorical significance, whether it’s cardboard or grain or a radio or a scent coming out of a fragrance bottle.”
With the cardboard in Folding, “I was really interested in this idea of human knowledge and how we accumulate things that we know about the world,” he said. New information gets stacked on top of old information, which often becomes obsolete. “It sort of just gets smushed into the stack of knowledge,” he said, “and we just keep putting new stuff on top of it.”
To signify the shift from the belief that the Earth is flat, for example, one section of the performance includes “the dance of the rounded world” and “the dance of the flat Earth.” The dancers circulate among the floating cardboard panels and, in some moments, look for ways to lie prone on them.
Bodel didn’t intend Folding as an inherently political statement, but he recognizes that the current moment is rife with misinformation and disputed knowledge. “There’s more disbelief about facts that we’ve understood for years, and that’s alarming,” he said.
Equally concerning, he said, is people’s lack of desire to seek new ideas and unwillingness to accept what they don’t understand: “We’ve lost the joy that different previous generations had of just wondering at the things that we don’t know or can’t ever know.”
The choreographers made their own discoveries while working with the cardboard. Morgan and Satterlee took many hours to learn to adapt to its characteristics.
At times the cardboard was “floppier than we wanted, and once it gets bent, it never becomes rigid again. It’s compromised,” Bodel said, adding that the dancers scored some of the pieces into textured mats.
Another inspiration was “that moment when the sheets are all vertical and then they fall,” he said. They built a part of the dance around that.
Morgan, 29, said she appreciated working in partnership with Bodel and Satterlee in the intellectual development of the piece, a process that encouraged them to play with different concepts. His “nonlinear” approach led his collaborators to use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the ideas.
“Hanna and I were kind of, like, lost in the sauce a little bit,” she said. “Michael, he has a brain like nobody that I’ve ever met before. He has very big ideas, very complex, very intellectual. And I think all of those things exist in his head.”
As a choreographer herself, she added, “I could still come in with my own creative agency. And it felt like it was scratching that itch.”
Mexican composer Rodrigo Martínez Torres, who goes by Rodrigo MT, created an original score to accompany Folding. He and Bodel met when the composer won a composition prize at Dartmouth and later completed his master’s of fine arts degree there. Classically trained yet experimental in his sound projects, he developed the music in tandem with the choreography.
Some of the music evokes an industrial setting “like a factory,” and other parts sound more “woody, scratchy, organic,” Bodel said, adding that the score is central to the performance.
Bodel grew up “all over New England” and double-majored in dance and astronomy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He spent a few summers with Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover and then with the Dream Music Puppetry Program in New York City, leading to the prominence of puppets in his early work.
He came to Vermont 13 years ago for the open space, he said. That rural landscape also complicates the logistics of dancers working together across distances and bringing performances to far-flung audiences.
“Some people are in Burlington, but we’re doing shows down in Putney, and there’s rehearsal space in between,” Bodel said of his troupe.
The gaps between and after the five premiere shows will give Bodel a chance to polish and, he hopes, add more performances.
“A piece is never really done,” he said.
The Institute for Folding, created by Michael Bodel, Wednesday, September 17, 7:30 p.m., at Mahaney Arts Center, Middlebury College, $5-20; Saturday, September 20, 7:30 p.m., at Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro, $20; Friday, September 26, 7 p.m., at Next Stage Arts in Putney, $20; Friday, October 3, 7:30 p.m., at First Congregational Church in Burlington, $20; and Wednesday, October 29, 7:30 p.m., at Briggs Opera House in White River Junction, $20. vermontdance.org/institute-for-folding
The original print version of this article was headlined “In the Fold | With a new dance project, choreographer Michael Bodel explores human knowledge of the world”
This article appears in Sep 17-23 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
