INTERDISCIPLINARY TAP DANCE ARTIST
WORK & RESEARCH
Details on some of Michael's current and past projects.
rhy/ntology (or, to be the rhythm) 2026
Performance installation
April 2026, Developmental Workshop, Muhlenberg College (Allentown, PA)
With rhy/ntology, Love remains committed to his positioning of rhythm as an embodied-intellectual method for researching Black cultural histories as he shifts his focus from working “with and through” rhythm to working “as,” or becoming, rhythm. Instead of looking towards what literary scholar Nadia Ellis calls an “elsewhere” of liberatory possibilities for Black queerness or attempting to travel to such a “new and satisfying space of exile” as he has done in his previous work, Love now ventures to explore the possibility of becoming his own “elsewhere.” Ultimately, rhy/ntology encompasses Love's embodied, rhythm-based exploration of legacy, futurity, labor in the name of liberation and pleasure, and the Ellis-ian concept of “resolving” one’s own “potential.”
As the 2025-26 Dexter F. and Dorothy H. Baker Foundation Artist-In-Residence in the Department of Theater and Dance at Muhlenberg College, Love is planning a workshop for development of rhy/ntology in April 2026. The cast is to feature Love, Benae Beamon, Jeffrey Clark Jr., Lisa La Touche, and Kaleena Miller.
Length of work: 70 minutes / Premiere Cast: 5 dancers
Photo © 2023 by Justin Williams,
courtesy of The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, U of Maryland, College Park
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Standpoint (Rhy)pistemology 2024
Performance
June 2024, Cell Cycles, Amant (Brooklyn, NY)
"Standpoint (Rhy)pistemology features rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown, Jr. and interdisciplinary tap dance artist Michael J. Love in an evening of performances which together map the foundational Black histories of techno and house music onto improvisational and choreographed tap dance. Drawing from Michael J. Love’s idea of (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM), this event evokes the sociopolitical theory of “standpoint epistemology,” providing a framework through which marginalized people may generate new ideas and outcomes from their own specific cultural experience of electronic music and the future. This program channels DeForrest’s research on African American modernist traditions of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression."
Length of work: 90 minutes
Photo © 2023 by Sarah Annie Navarrete
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The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection, Part III:
(RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM) 2023
Performance
April 2023, Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX)
February 2023, Princeton University workshop presentation (Princeton, NJ)
The third installment in Michael J. Love’s The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection sees the tap dance artist and an ensemble of collaborators map the foundational Black histories of techno and house music onto improvisation and choreography that envisions an ‘elsewhere’ of liberatory possibilities. (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! stands as an embodied testimony of the wealth of cultural knowledge stored in Black American forms of movement and music and the generative, life-giving potential available to those who engage in the labor necessary to honor and carry such forms forward.
In the premiere version of (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY!, Love and dancers Benae Beamon, Jeffrey Clark Jr., Kaleena Miller, Adriana J. Ray, and Robyn Watson worked through an original electronic music soundscape by rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown Jr. and traversed a multimedia installation by anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson.
Length of work: 70 minutes / Premiere Cast: 6 dancers, 1 musician
Learn more here.
Photo © 2023 by Sarah Annie Navarrete
The present is a sustained attempt at
finding one’s own pleasure. 2022
Performance
December 2022, Princeton Dance Festival, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ)
“The present is a sustained attempt at finding one’s own pleasure. is a new tap dance work by 2021-23 Princeton Arts Fellow Michael J. Love. In response to The future is a constant wake., his 2019 video collaboration with film-based artist Aryel René Jackson, Love’s piece oscillates between two seminal mid-1960s Nina Simone recordings, words by Black feminist writer and performance artist Ra/Malika Imhotep (as performed by voice artist Deja Morgan), and a cappella tap rhythms. In its aural and visual complexity, The present… offers space for recognizing the labor necessary to eke joy and pleasure out of circumstances and systems designed against such experiences."
Length of work: 10 minutes / Premiere Cast: 11 dancers
Photo © 2022 by Maria Baranova,
courtesy of The Program in Dance, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University
Calls To (/About) ‘Elsewhere’ 2022
Performance
September 2022, The Trace Of An Implied Presence, The Shed (New York, NY)
Love presented Calls To (/About) 'Elsewhere' at the invitation of visual artist, filmmaker, and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden. The performance was developed to accompany McClodden's film portrait of Love as part of her exhibition, The Trace Of An Implied Presence.
Interdisciplinary tap dance artist Michael J. Love uses Calls To (/About) ‘Elsewhere’ to catalog a series of recent phone conversations with close friends and loved ones. By pairing these voice recordings with improvised movement, a curated house music playlist, and sampled bits of popular media, Love engages in a process of “rhythm dreaming” a space of Black liberation, prosperity, and joy.
Length of work: 50 minutes
Photo © 2023, video still, The Trace Of An Implied Presence,
courtesy of Tiona Nekkia McClodden/TNM STUDIOS LLC
We are the [Hackers], Baby, [Hackers] are we 2021
Collaboration with anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson
Multi-channel video installation
October 2021, 2021 Tito's Vodka Prize Exhibition, Big Medium gallery (Austin, TX)
"In We are the [Hackers], Baby, [Hackers] are we, Aryel René Jackson and Michael J. Love perform as their alter egos, Confuserella and Babé, and illustrate a Black futuristic location where wormholes serve as conduits between the present and past. The two hack a method for traversing time and imagining new sites for planting their loved ones’ histories. This is embedded in the work’s namesake, a hack of the debut single title from Real People, Chic’s 1980 album. We are the [Hackers], Baby, [Hackers] are we is made up of three components linked together through Jackson and Love’s collaborative process: personal and visual research become part of a live rhythm tap dance performance which is then captured and archived through a multi-camera setup." (Read more here.)
Length of work: 9 minutes
Photo © 2021 by Cindy Elizabeth, Illustration by Aryel René Jackson
Descendance 2021
Collaboration with anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson
Video
May 2022, Modern Mondays: Ariel René Jackson, MoMA (New York, NY)
January 2021, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, U of Washington (Seattle, WA)
"Set inside an empty swimming pool at the George Washington Carver Center, Descendance explores ideas of lineage and generational change by transforming an American flag stenciled with soil... 'The piece was influenced by dance and movement, by history that lives in the body,' Jackson says. Over the course of Descendance, Jackson and Love organically change the flag as they move through it... The piece builds on Carver's Message in Blue, an earlier project in which Jackson and Love altered a soil-made American flag in the Carver Center pool to a recording of George Washington Carver reciting his favorite poem, 'Equipment.'" (Read more here.)
Descendance features an original score by jazz musician Joseph C. Dyson Jr. and videography work by Eliot Gray Fisher. The video is set in the "sunken stage" behind the George Washington Carver, Museum, Cultural, and Genealogy Center (Austin, TX), an empty pool which has been redesigned and repainted by artist Eto Otitigbe.
Length of work: 7 minutes
Video still, Descendance (2021)
Carver's Message In Blue 2020
Collaboration with anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson
Performance installation
February 2020, George Washington Carver Museum (Austin, TX)
In Carver’s Message In Blue (2020), Jackson and Love transform a replica of the United States flag stenciled in soil as they wrestle with the sentiments of upward mobility and perseverance echoing from a found recording of George Washington Carver reciting his favorite poem, “Equipment” (circa 1900). Ultimately, the work joins installation and time-based performance in a meditation on identity and possibility. Carver’s Message In Blue was developed as part of the Works In Progress Series at the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural, and Genealogy Center in East Austin, TX and presented in the Museum’s abandoned pool, aptly referred to as “the sunken stage.”
Length of work: 15 minutes
Documentation photo, Carver's Message In Blue (2020)
The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection, Part II:
DOPE FIT! 2019
Performance
September 2019, ARCOS Presents Michael J. Love (Austin, TX)
April 2019, The Cohen New Works Festival, UT Austin (Austin, TX)
Fall 2018 - Spring 2019, Initial Development (Austin, TX)
August 2018, Exploratory Workshop (Austin, TX)
Love and an ensemble of artists, thinkers, and collaborators pair movement, rhythm, music, text, and voice with a distinct millennial hip-hop sensibility to create and live in their own metaphysical utopia. The piece moves through the Black cultural archive and enlivens spirited visions of futurity through an intersectional lens. DOPE FIT! is performed entirely to live-mixed and looped tap dance, body percussion, and triggered drum sample compositions.
The development of DOPE FIT! began during a week-long workshop in August 2018, made possible by a Go! Grant from The Cohen New Works Festival. The premiere version of DOPE FIT! was a choreographic collaboration between Love and dance Kaitlyn B. Jones.
Length of work: 70 minutes / Premiere Cast: 8 dancers, 5 actors
Learn more here.
Photo © 2019 by Sarah Annie Navarrete
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#SampledMixedAndRemixed Series 2019-2021
Performance
September 2021, Reactivating Memory Symposium, Princeton U (Princeton, NJ)
September 2019, ARCOS Presents Michael J. Love (Austin, TX)
#SampledMixedAndRemixed is a series of real-time experiments with genre, to research Black music history and theorize a queer presence within the archive of classic jazz recordings. Meditating, via tap dance improvisation, to both original recordings and recent electronic music remixes of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” and “See-Line Woman,” for example, informs the use of a looping pedal and drum machine to reconstruct the rhythmic essence of seminal Black performances with corporeal sounds. These loops are then layered with EDM kicks and hi-hats to evidence how a Black, queer house music affect could be inherent to the original tune itself. This process opens up thinking on liveness vs. mediated performance, the human vs. machine, and temporality while identifying narratives that our cultural archives have failed to capture. The series includes:
#SampledMixedAndRemixed: 'Sinnerman'
#SampledMixedAndRemixed: 'See-Line Woman'
and #SampledMixedAndRemixed: 'Rockin' In Rhythm'
Length of each work: 7-10 minutes
Photo © 2019 by Uli García Vela
The future is a constant wake. 2019
Collaboration with anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson
Video
August 2022, Tending Land, DARC Project Space (Ottawa, Canada)
July 2021, Lux Aeterna, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, U of Washington (Seattle, WA)
August 2020, #TBlackArtBlackLife Series, NY Times Style Magazine
March 2020, SXSW Art Program (Austin, TX)
September 2019, Screen Series: Ariel René Jackson, New Museum (New York, NY)
April 2019, Premiere, The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection, Part II: DOPE FIT!!
The future is a constant wake. centers soil as a conduit for sustained engagement with previous generations. Developed as a collaboration between Ariel René Jackson and Michael J. Love, the video proposes a somatic way of forging connection with the past through touch and movement.
Length of work: 7 minutes
Video still, The future is a constant wake. (2019)
All I See Is Blue 2018
Collaboration with anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson
Performance installation
September 2018, Original Language, CUE Art Foundation (New York, NY)
Winter 2017, Premiere (Austin, TX)
Winter 2017, Initial Development (Austin, TX)
“All I See Is Blue,” is a performance by Aryel René Jackson and Michael J. Love, in which the artists activate Jackson's sculptural installation, All I See is Blue, to translate Langston Hughes' 1935 poem Let America Be America Again. Layering the piece with sound and dance, the performers simultaneously pay homage to Hughes while pointing to similarities between American identity politics of the 1930s and now.
Length of work: 12 minutes
Photo © 2018 by Chauncey Velasco
The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection, Part I:
GON' HEAD AND PUT YOUR RECORDS ON! 2017
Performance
April 2019, Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX)
February 2018, Developmental Workshop Presentation (Austin, TX)
April 2017, Premiere (Austin, TX)
Winter 2016 - Spring 2017, Initial Development (Austin, TX)
With GON' HEAD AND PUT YOUR RECORDS ON!, Love curates a vibrant amalgamation of moments from pop culture and his personal history to examine the various portions of his identity while actualizing self-love and self-care. RECORDS! is anchored by tap improvography and spans a number of performance mediums as it nods to traditions as varied as the Black queer ballroom scene and the Black church, demanding the necessary space for resilience.
Length of work: 70 minutes / Premiere Cast: 1 dancer, 3 actors
Learn more here.
Photo © 2017 by Cindy Elizabeth