Michael Bodel:
The Institute for Folding

VDA 2025 Artist in Residence

A cardboard choreography of human knowledge, neglect and wonder.

Created by Michael Bodel

Choreography and Performance by Michael Bodel, Cailin Morgan, and Hanna Satterlee

Original Score by Rodrigo MT

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2025 Artist in Residence Program

This year, our Artist in Residence program invited Vermonters to explore how knowledge itself is built, layered, and reshaped through The Institute for Folding, an interdisciplinary performance created by Michael Bodel. Through movement, language, live sound, and 30 sheets of cardboard, the work became a physical meditation on how our world accumulates information—what we stack, what we discard, and what we choose to keep close as “truth.”

For many watching, the piece acted as a cardboard mirror of our moment. We live in an era where facts are created, shared, and questioned at unprecedented speed. Some pieces of information enter our collective archive even when they’re wrong; others ring true but feel too uncomfortable to hold. The Institute for Folding revealed that the truths we use to build our future are not drawn from a distant, objective reality, but from the ideas, people, and “facts” we cling to most tightly.

Described by Bodel as “a dance for our precipitous moment,” the work examines society’s relationship with knowledge—our hunger for understanding, the rise and fall of ignorance, and our growing disconnection from what has already been discovered. It also speaks to something we’ve lost: the collective wonder that once fueled discovery, the same wonder that shone in the eyes of children and early civilizations.

Through months of workshops, work-in-progress showings, and a five-stop statewide tour, The Institute for Folding reached more than 800 people across Vermont, bringing locally produced professional dance to communities in every region. Audience members frequently shared how deeply the work resonated with the current climate of America—its uncertainty, its contradictions, and its longing for clarity.

This is exactly what the Artist in Residence program has worked to cultivate: bold new work, thoughtful inquiry, community connection, and paid opportunities for dance artists across our state.

As Vermont’s service organization for dance, VDA is proud to support artists and bring impactful, relevant work to communities statewide. We are deeply grateful to our sustaining members, donors, and partners whose commitment makes this program possible.

If you believe in the transformative power of dance, we invite you to donate or become a member—and help us continue creating meaningful opportunities for Vermont’s dance artists to thrive.

A photo of Michael standing in a field

Photo by Swoyer Photography

About Michael:

Michael makes interdisciplinary dance works. Many integrate objects, place and sensorial stuff. His process involves wide-ranging research and both serious and silly play. And collaborators vary from project to project. Michael’s past works have included dances choreographed to oral histories of immigration, a pageant set in an apple orchard, and a dance iteration of Foucault’s Corps Utopique. Prior to The Institute for Folding, he created a dance project centered on grain—how it is sown, gathered, cared, hoarded and lost. 

He is honored to sit (and move) on the board of advisors of The Field Center in Rockingham, VT, and has served on the board of the Society of Dance History Scholars (now Dance Studies Association). He fancies writing about historical pageantry and embodied cognition, and works daily as the Director of External Affairs at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth. Michael lives with his family in the fields of Putney, VT.

Collaborating Artists

Rodrigo MT

Hanna Satterlee

Caitlin Morgan

  • Sound Composition

    Rodrigo Martínez Torres (CDMX, Mexico) is a composer interested in the inner architecture of sound, and its resonances with the mind. He is a multi-instrumentalist, and his work spans radio broadcasting and production, performing in rock bands, composing for the orchestra, and scoring for film and theater.

    Rodrigo’s recent projects include a sonic and sculptural installation inspired by the architecture of Luis Barragán and composing the score for the film Doce Lunas, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. Rodrigo has been a MacDowell Fellow, won the 2020 Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble Composition Competition, and the 2017 Arturo Márquez composition competition with his piece “Mambo Urbano”, for chamber orchestra. He studied music composition in Academia de Arte de Florencia (CDMX) and in Centro Superior Katarina Gurska (Madrid, Spain), and holds an MFA in Sonic Practice from Dartmouth College (NH, USA)

  • Ensemble

    Caitlin Morgan is a Burlington-based creative with roots in the Midwest and NYC, interested in flow-state embodiment as a means of eliciting nuanced, collective understanding and alchemical impact. Her work—commonly inspired by ecosomatics, communication theories, and postmodernism—has been featured across New York, Vermont, Ohio, and Michigan, including for the Junction Dance Festival (as a ChoreoLab artist in residence), the Small Plates Choreography Festival, Teatro LATEA, Mark Morris Dance Center, the Actors’ Fund Arts Center, and more. Woven around her movement research, Caitlin edits novels, performs with ANIMALDance and other local makers, and facilitates classes at Lines Vermont, Studio 3, and Sangha Studio.

  • Ensemble

    Hanna Satterlee creates performance experiences and conceptual artworks for stage, site and film. Hanna holds degrees and certifications in dance therapy, psychology, performance, choreography, vinyassa/yin/restorative yoga, non-profit management​, interdisciplinary art, and arts integration. Hanna shares these passions as an intergenerational educator, interdisciplinary performer​ + collaborator, contemporary choreographer, experimental curator and event producer.

    Dance has brought her around the world but always back home to VT, where she has had the opportunity to create new programs, curriculums, organizations and events for dancers and the public. ​Hanna is the founder of the Vermont Dance Alliance, the INSTINCT Experimental Dance Festival​, and ANIMAL Dance Performance and Production Company​. Hanna currently directs ANIMAL Dance, based in Burlington VT.

Devising Labs

This dance project has been developed in layers, and one of those is a series of free devising labs that were open to the public. Through these labs, participants workshoped cardboard as a choreographic inspiration and design partner, and contributed to the evolution of the performance. Special thanks to The Flynn, Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, and Next Stage Arts Project for hosting these labs, and to 2025 Junction Dance Festival, for featuring a work-in-progress showing.

Photo credits: Institute for folding, Kay McCabe, 2025

Special thanks to our Partners who have helped make this residency possible!

Vermont Arts Council, The Byrne Foundation, Middlebury Dance Department, Next Stage Arts Project, Highland Center for the Arts, Mascoma Bank, Junction Dance Festival, LINES Vermont Dance Studio, The Flynn, The Dance and Movement Center, The Putney School, The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth, and Junction Arts & Media!

  • Vermont Arts Council

  • The Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation

  • Middlebury College Dance Deptartment

  • Next Stage Arts

  • Highland Center for the Arts

  • Mascoma Bank

  • The Junction Dance Festival

  • LINES Vermont Dance Studio

  • The Flynn

  • Dance and Movement Center

  • The Putney School

  • The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth

  • Junction Arts & Media