MICHAEL DANE

I was born in San Francisco in 1954 and raised amid the tangle that was the racial tension of the late 1950’s and 1960’s. I trained in the classic Russian Ballet, moved to New York on a prestigious scholarship with School of American Ballet at the Julliard School and later American Ballet Theatre. I was recruited to the Iranian National Ballet in 1976, but in the wake of the frightful events leading up to the toppling of the Shah of Iran, I fled Tehran over the Turkish mountains, a fugitive of the state.

After returning home I searched for a more personal means of expression, I danced with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo en travesti and created an infamous persona of a beautiful and talented lesbian dancer named Peg, a very real personality. I performed in the avant-garde theater of the East and West Villages in a time when mind-altering drugs forged a unique bond between audience, writer and performer. A chance elevator encounter brought me back to Paris for five years with a recording contract where I met a young, unknown Madonna Ciccone. There I found a voice, wrote and recorded music of truly dangerous proportion, released three albums and performed everywhere, from a Duke’s wedding on the Seine to Baron Lambert's apartment over his bank in Brussels.

Still, a recurring theme plays itself out in each episode of my life; the cost of acceptance is always denial, so I am at odds with the world, or so it seems and as I grow older I realize that in ghettos and in stereotypes there is an underlying thread of a war, not with society, but with ourselves. As a result of my conspicuous rebellion, that of simply being myself, of not living in disguise, I began to discover another society -- a Secret Society -- of people who have grown up in this world, where lies of omission shape our destiny and keep us apart. My stories are images of different selves developing in that dangerous void and a message to all people who live in disguise and have no reflection, to people who grow up in isolation and create their lives out of their own imagination.