Michael Counts

Counts has worked in a wide range of contexts and locations including a performance on the side of a mountain in Japan, a custom-designed bus that made Times Square and the surrounding streets its stage, an immersive environment for a program of spatial music for symphony orchestra presented in a drill hall, a six-story video tower in a planned community in Florida, and two immersive adaptations of Dante’s The Divine Comedy: the first an evening performance in a series of walk-through installations in a 40,000 square foot Brooklyn warehouse and the second in an escape room maze in Midtown Manhattan. He has also directed and designed opera productions at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City Center, the Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College, and on tour at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Many of his innovations anticipated new developments in the worlds of live performance, design and the digital realm.

In New York, 90 Degrees from an Equinox? Where are We? And Where are We Going? was a twelve-hour performance installation that took place over the course of six days in a 65,000 sq. ft. space on the 51st floor of 55 Water Street. Texts by Gertrude Stein and John Cage were performed alongside original and found texts by actors performing in an environment made of a field of wild grass harvested from Jamaica Bay. wine-blue-open-water was a walk-through performance installation freely adapted from Homer’s Odyssey with a pre-recorded text by Ruth Margraff. Set elements were rolled in on wagons past performers stationed like statues on a vacant floor of 67 Broad Street. Counts and the company also produced Oh… A Fifty-Year Dart (a series of episodes that unfolded over the course of three months), Departure, Ark, and TO SEA: Another Mountain at a range of locations including Grand Central Terminal, the SoHo Arts Festival and the Tunnel nightclub.

Internationally, a nine-member company went to Thailand to collaborate with the BoiSakti Dance Theatre of Indonesia under the auspices of the Bangkok-Bali-Berlin Festival, and Counts, Stern and Oglevee were joined by composer Joseph Diebes to study Butoh at Min Tanaka’s Body Weather Farm in Japan. At the Farm, Counts directed and designed I Dug a Pit a Meter Six in Either Direction and Filled it Full of Sake. I Mixed in Honey and Milk and Poured It Over Barley and Pine Nuts and Rice and Onion and Fruit and Blood and Stopped. The performance was set halfway up a mountain, requiring the audience to make an arduous hike then descend at night, the experience of which was integrated into the performance concept. Counts described the work as occupying the territory “when dance-theatre starts to bleed more into proper theater”.

The first fully staged production Counts directed and designed in the new space was The Field of Mars, which was inspired by Tacitus’ account of the burning of Rome. A one-line summary in the playbill read "This performance is as a dream is, or a landscape. Its meaning is more or less what you determine." The pre-show began in the shopfront gallery as the audience milled around a bar and one by one noticed an actor dressed in elegant evening wear suspended high above on a wire. He descended a ladder with his hands, then led the audience up a ramp decorated with a frieze of tiny flames (a reference to the Great Fire of Rome) to the warehouse space above, where they encountered a series of episodes described in The New York Times as “a fun house for the senses… a cascade of images conjured by the conscious and subconscious, and with the question of how pictures framed in the mind's eye make their way into everything, from ancient myth to abstract paintings to commercial movies." The audience was guided through multiple installations by intelligent and moving stage lights and Diebes’ through-composed electronic score: a living room whose back wall disappeared to reveal a pixie in a slowly receding forest, a tryst in a public bathroom mounted on wheels and swirling around the space, a family dinner at an ornate and extravagantly long table, a tartan-skirted schoolgirl emerging from the top of a wardrobe, and more. A sequel, The Field of Mars - Chapter 1, was mounted in 2006 by Counts Media, in which groups of six people were guided through multiple locations in mid-Manhattan including Grand Central Terminal, a Park Avenue office building, a minivan, the basement of a manufacturing building in the Fashion District, and the interior of a Lincoln Continental. The Field of Mars – Chapter 1 was produced in part as a developmental workshop for The Ride, a commercial entertainment concept developed with a group that included Broadway producers Robyn Goodman, Vivek Tiwary, Charles Flateman, Barry Tatelman and media executive Scott Carlin. The Field of Mars – Chapter 1 also anticipated Counts' 2017 work, The Path of Beatrice, an extension of his immersive escape room Paradiso.

The last large-scale performance installation produced by GAle GAtes et al. in DUMBO was So Long Ago I Can’t Remember (2001) a free adaptation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy with a text by Kevin Oakes pre-recorded by the actors (who lip-synched their lines in the live performance) and choreography by Roht. So Long Ago marked a return to the walk-through format of previous performance installations. Dante’s nine circles of hell were depicted in a series of installations in which audience members alternately roamed and were seated as multiple performances unfolded around them - and, at some points, in their midst.

The audience entered through the back of the warehouse for the first time and took their seats at cafe tables. A dominatrix-like mistress of ceremonies portraying Virgil - the only performer whose words were not pre-recorded - issued instructions on how to move through the space and rules for interacting with the performers. A chorus of women in elegant modern matching suits with fur collars appeared, one in the attitude of walking a statue of a greyhound sitting stiffly at attention, followed by a solitary male actor also in elegant modern clothing (Counts’ Dante). He stopped in front of an opening in a large wall which then tipped over and fell to the floor around him, pushing a strong gust of wind out at the audience. The actor was then joined by an actress for a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers tap routine. They exited to reveal a boatful of lost souls crossing the river Styx.

The events of 9/11 took place a few weeks after So Long Ago closed. In the aftermath, there was a significant shift in Counts’ work back towards his original intentions for doing site-specific works outdoors for unsuspecting audiences.

While virtually all of Counts’ works prior to 2002 could be categorized as immersive events, his work in theatre, visual art and interactive installation after 9/11 developed along separate tracks.

Looking Forward was followed by (and was a prelude for) The World: An Immersive Installation Performance, a series of interactive events that returned to the format of Counts' earlier works in which an overarching, open-ended narrative would unfold in multiple episodes staged in different locations over a period of months. For the prelude, two dozen writers were invited to respond to a group of miniature cinematic vistas and environments created by Counts that situated dozens of figurines on surreal landscapes, and the resulting playtexts were presented in public readings. The first episode was a performance installation at the Whitney Museum of Art’s Annex at the Altria Atrium in Midtown Manhattan inspired by the texts. The second episode was presented by the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, NY. Multiple sets and dioramas were installed in the windows and parking spaces of a nearby restaurant, including a vintage red Ferrari dino illuminated by red stage lights and silent characters appearing one by one in the dioramas and atop an elevated outdoor platform under placards in the shape of speech bubbles on which wordless video collages were projected.

GAle GAtes et al.’s move to a permanent home in 1995 brought with it an obligation to attract a steady flow of visitors. Initially with Stern and later with New York City gallerists including Mike Weiss, Counts co-organized a series of exhibitions from 1996 to 1999 that attracted a steady flow of visitors to the DUMBO shopfront gallery. In 2001-2, Counts collaborated with Bob Bangiola (then at New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music), and Anne Ellegood (now Senior Curator at UCLA’s Hammer Museum), on organizing the Emerging Curator Series, whose unifying principle was viewing the curator as an artist. While there was resistance to this concept in New York's visual arts establishment, the series became a valued early career platform for curators and artists who soon thereafter rose to prominence in the art world. A few years later, curators in the US were widely regarded as having the capacity to be producing artists - as they already had been in Europe for some time - and scholarly articles were being written about the phenomenon.

Michael has been a featured speaker at MIT’s Media Lab, Omnicom’s Global Summit for the Radiate Group, and on panels hosted by City College and The Rockefeller Foundation. He has led workshops at several schools and other educational institutions including the California Institute of the Arts, Chiang Mai and Bangkok Universities, the Williamstown Theater Festival, and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Michael’s media concepts have been presented at MIT and at Ericsson’s Innovation Lab in Stockholm. He launched A-Plan Coaching in February 2018 and the iTunes podcast Producing Innovation in February 2019.

A key inspiration for Counts’ work is Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art in which all the various elements of drama – music, sound, text, movement, set and costume design – are integrated into a unified whole.

Another key inspiration is the work of the American director and designer Robert Wilson, to whom Counts is often compared and was a conscious influence. Some of the titles and locations of Counts’ early work paid direct homage to Wilson. While there are clear similarities between their work, Counts emerged from Wilson's shadow and found his own voice relatively early in his career. This is arguably because Counts drew so deeply on the raw material of his own personal experiences in his work – submerged as these were beneath multiple layers of allusion. Some have speculated that the reason his work continues to draw routine comparison with Wilson is due to the decline in the number of avant-garde artists active in performance beginning in the 1990s. In other words, the contexts in which his work could be fully understood and appreciated have narrowed considerably – there simply aren’t many other artists to compare him to.

Counts’ performance installations featured stylized movement that could take many forms, often infused with an erotic charge. Although key performers he worked with had undergone intensive studies in Butoh, this was not an influence on his own directorial approach but rather one of many elements within it (except in terms of the level of concentration, discipline and physical control required throughout, which could be considerable). After 2000, he began working regularly with choreographer Ken Roht, who performed with Reza Abdoh’s company Dar-a-Luz and served as Adboh’s choreographer on many productions.

Counts arguably created his most highly developed immersive environments in GAle GAtes et al.’s 40,000 square foot warehouse space, which served as a kind of laboratory in which he incubated performance concepts that grew more and more elaborate and refined over the course of the five years the company was in residence.

Many consider The Field of Mars and So Long Ago I Can’t Remember as the two productions that epitomize Counts’ immersive theatre aesthetic. These two performance installations – made before digital technology became a core component of his work and cast the public more fully in the role of author, and before the immersive genre went mainstream – were mounted in the cavernous DUMBO warehouse space through which audience members were free to wander and choose their own individual perspectives on the action unfolding around them. The feeling of moving through Counts’ fantasy landscapes added a layer of visceral complicity – the physical sensation of the body traveling through space had the effect of ″warming up” the individual's imagination and made it all that much easier for willing viewers to immerse themselves in the unending flow of images, sounds and movement.

This feeling can be compared to walking through the galleries of an art museum, much as Counts wandered through the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child. In some of the sequences in The Field of Mars, the experience was more like exploring different rooms in a nightclub, or, in the eyes of Peter Marks of The New York Times, “ a little bit like chasing a two year old around an apartment.” In Art and America, Douglas Davis described the Field of Mars audience as “dazzled witnesses to a cosmic event.”. In PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Michael Rush describes the experience of a Counts production as "akin to diving into a hypertext on the internet, but he’s doing all the clicking and controlling. It’s also like cruising through a fun house at the carnival, but the creatures popping out of the darkness aren’t just screaming, they’re reciting oblique texts from classical literature, art criticism, Fellini movies, and Dada playlets."

Counts’ use of language in his original works is another area in which there was a significant change post 9/11. In the years preceding, he worked with complete scripts that were either compilations of text fragments lifted from a variety of sources or playtexts by a single author (including two scripts he wrote himself). Then, authorship shifted to public participants prompted by live performers, pre-set tasks and texts for apps and other digital platforms which superseded theatrical scripts at the heart of his work.

The most important function of language in Counts’ oeuvre is as source material which is then transformed into the conceptual underpinnings of his ultimate performative frameworks. Counts’ description of how a book collection of the world's great letters was a seminal influence encapsulates this process:

In 2016, Counts staged the world premiere of the seven-hour The Ouroboros Trilogy, a production by Beth Morrison Projects presented by Arts Emerson at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston, MA. The work united three scores by Scott Wheeler (Naga), Zhou Long (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Madame White Snake) and Paola Prestini (Gilgamesh) under the umbrella of libretti written by a single author, Cerise Lim Jacobs. Madame White Snake was presented at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in March 2019.

Also in 2016, Counts partnered with former Jerry Bruckheimer producer and Las Vegas nightclub impresario Jennifer Worthington to create PARADISO: Chapter 1, an immersive escape room adaptated from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Groups of ten gamers moved through a series of five interconnected chapters in which they periodically encountered live performers in interiors conceived as the premises of the Virgil Corporation. In March 2017, Counts and his Paradiso creative team launched The Path of Beatrice, an extension of PARADISO: Chapter 1 that took audience members in small groups of 1-4 people through a series of real world experiences over the course of a week, referencing the David Fincher film The Game and 2013 cult film The Institute.

In 2016, Counts collaborated with Florida artist JEFRË and 3-Legged Dog on creating The Beacon and Code Wall, a six-story hyperbolic convex-concave tower animated by dynamic video designs commissioned by the Tavistock Development Company for the planned community of Lake Nona in Florida.

Beginning in 2014, Counts renewed his work on immersive live performance in events that crossed over into the worlds of fashion and television. As Creative Director of the Jet Set Event for Michael Kors in Shanghai, Counts utilized a large eyeliner video projection screen in an aircraft hangar (Hongquiao Airport in Shanghai, China) where a private jet plane was parked. The same year, he was creative consultant and stage director for Walking Dead Escape, an immersive theatrical adaptation of the Walking Dead Comics and AMC television show produced by Skybound EXP at the Hartford Xfinity Theatre and at Petco Park for the San Diego International Comic Con. Counts then wrote, directed and produced The Walking Dead Experience – Chapter 1 in partnership with Walker Stalker Con. Groups of seven people were dropped into a sequence of encounters lasting 30 minutes that rendered a small town in the throes of a deadly outbreak, all set in a 10,000 square foot immersive space with special effects. In 2016, Michael Counts conceived, designed and directed a fashion show concept and presentation in collaboration with Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff for the Betty & Veronica by Rachel Antonoff brand at New York Fashion Week which combined the aesthetics of comics and pop art with high fashion in anticipation of the launch of Riverdale on the CW.

When he moved back to New York City, he co-founded GAle GAtes et al. – a name inspired by Counts’ grandmother – with performer and producer Michelle Stern and scholar and Butoh performer John Oglevee, whom Counts had met in Prague and had made the introduction to Stern on their return. With the help of the LMCC, where the embryonic company had been appointed Artist-in-Residence, Counts was able to work with vast spatial “canvases” right away, securing temporary use of the vacant floors of skyscrapers in the financial district which provided the epic perspectives that have remained an essential aspect of his work.

The second act began with a speech by the anarchist labor organizer Emma Goldman envisioning a bleak future for the workers. The audience was then led across a bridge spanning a pool of white fluorescent lights as Dante stood silently by in 13th century costume, head bowed. The bridge led to a small space in which the audience huddled around a quartet of seated actors lit from below in ghoulish green light delivering a string of non-sequiturs about a Pomeranian.

Counts returned to New York City Opera in 2013 to direct and design Rossini’s Moses in Egypt. The set design featured a backdrop of LED screens displaying imagery created in collaboration with Ada Whitney, co-founder and creative director of [1]. Animations of night skies, deserts, and the parting of the Red Sea were interspersed with abstract shapes and video of natural forms. Through the use of an LED backdrop, Counts was able to realize on a big screen the cinematic pans and aerial shots that had been an implied element of his live stage work, while adding new effects through confronting the invented time on the LED screens with the real time of the live performance, partly through the use of a revolving stage. Moses in Egypt marked the first time New York City Opera had performed in its original home, City Center, since moving to Lincoln Center in the mid ‘60s.

The first work Counts created after 9/11 was Looking Forward, a video homage to New York City mounted in April–May 2002 in the clock faces of the DUMBO clocktower. A looped series of video portraits showed the faces of volunteers who had recorded messages describing “New York moments”. The audio of the voices of the New Yorkers who were interviewed, set to an original soundtrack, was simulcast by WFMU on May 3.

In 2012, Counts was invited by New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert to direct and design New York Philharmonic 360, a staging of “spatial music” for orchestra in the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall presented in-the-round. Counts designed an immersive lighting and performance environment for works by Gabrieli, Boulez, Mozart, Stockhausen and Ives that included living statues costumed for their subsequent performance of the Act I finale of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" which the audience encountered in a space under the bleachers upon entering, and large luminous screens installed behind each orchestra that glowed in blue, red and yellow. There were three orchestras for Stockhausen's Gruppen, arranged in a circle, with audience sections in the center and in between. The performance was featured in a free worldwide webcast on Medici.tv.

In 2011, Director of New York City Opera (NYCO) George Steel invited Counts to direct and design a new production entitled Monodramas at Lincoln Center. Monodramas was an evening of works for solo soprano and orchestra: the world stage premiere of La Machine de l'Être by John Zorn, Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg, and the US stage premiere of Neither by Morton Feldman, with a libretto by Samuel Beckett. Steel had first encountered Counts’ work at GAle GAtes et al. and had been in discussions about presenting performances of John Cage in the GAle GAtes et al. space prior to 9/11. The production featured episodes that provided a through line tying all of the works together, bookended by an intro and outro performed in silence.

In 2011, Counts created a series of twelve sculptures that took key motifs from Monodramas, the evening of operas for soprano and orchestra he was directing and designing at Lincoln Center. Six of the twelve sculptures in the series, entitled Dream Sequence 3:52:29 am–3:56:12 am, were displayed in the lobby of the theatre during performances of Monodramas as visual elements integral to the experience of the evening as a whole. The other six sculptures were simultaneously exhibited at John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz.

In 2007/8, Counts founded Counts Media and raised financing to fully realize the conceptual blueprints for Yellow Arrow and two digital projects created, directed and designed for the Blue Man Group - Mobkastr; an early application of mobile technology to performance designed for the North American tour of How to be a Megastar); and BILL: The World’s First Live and Interactive Video Billboard in Las Vegas. 2010 saw the launch of The Ride, a custom-designed bus tour along a 4.2 mile route through Mid-Manhattan. The bus seats were turned to the side so that the audience could look directly at the sidewalks, where live performers would appear including a UPS delivery man who launched into a breakdance, a ballet duet on Columbus Circle, a rapper improvising rhymes to pedestrians on 42nd Street, and a re-enactment of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. Each bus was equipped with a sound system and dozens of synchronized video monitors. Two tour guides played the roles of urban researchers as they introduced each new sight and videos with historical and statistical background played on the screens.

After GAle GAtes et al. closed in 2003, Counts embarked on a series of interactive works situated in the public realm. In Yellow Arrow (2004), Counts collaborated with Christopher Allen, Brian House, and Jesse Shapins to create “Massively Authored Public Art” that was a forerunner of the geospatial web in its creation of a “deep map” of the world. Volunteers who submitted online requests were sent coded stickers by mail and asked to write a message, place the stickers in a location of their choice, and submit a photograph of the site by SMS. In 2005 Counts and the Yellow Arrow Mobile App/Global Public Art Project created an immersive installation and exhibition for Piaget at Art Basel Miami, and in 2006 extended the scope of the project to an augmented reality game called ICUH8ING. An estimated 7,535 Yellow Arrow stickers were placed in 467 cities and 35 countries worldwide..

In 2000, Counts was invited to direct Gertrude Stein’s Listen to Me at the CalArts Center for New Performance in Valencia, California. The production featured three iterations of the same three characters: a man dressed alternately in a snowsuit and a schoolboy’s uniform; a woman also appearing in multiple incarnations including an opulent 18th century white wig topped by a silver model of a three-masted sailing ship; and an art museum guard. The stage design featured a series of sunken trenches created by rows of white cuboids that extended the width of the stage and rose to chest height, and a suspended walkway above. The choreography was by Ken Roht, who had previously worked with Reza Abdoh and became a frequent collaborator of Counts’ in the years following.

Tilly Losch, produced later in 1998 and described by Counts as “a dream one might have had if falling asleep after watching Casablanca”, took its inspiration from the eponymous shadow box sculpture by Joseph Cornell. It was the first of two GAle GAtes et al. productions in which the audience was seated for the duration so that the 120 feet throw of the backstage area was visible through the false proscenium of an industrial passageway. The proscenium was initially masked by a backdrop as a series of vignettes played out in front - two soldiers playing chess, a row of seated cinemagoers rolling across the stage on casters to audio from the film Casablanca, a Butoh solo. The proscenium then opened up to reveal a series of shadow box-like scenes that receded further and further back into the space as the action progressed – a couple arguing in one window and a pensive man listening to Nina Simone in another in a recreated section of the Met Life Building Clock Tower facade and a recreation of Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World. Christina was portrayed as having lost the use of her legs and dragging herself into position to the sounds of birdcalls, crickets and gusts of wind. The sun set at the same pace it does in real time, and lights in the model house on the hill turned on one by one. The scene concluded after a model hot air balloon and an airplane appeared far off in the sky. In the climactic scene - a recreation of the titular Cornell work - the hot air balloon was shown in virtual close-up as a performer floated through a frame suspended on wires.

After completing the LMCC residency, Counts began to search for a permanent home for the company that could accommodate the cinematic perspectives that were now a constant in his work. Brooklyn Academy of Music Executive Producer Joseph V. Melillo pointed him to the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood now known as DUMBO, where David Walentas of Two Trees Management offered him a lease for a 40,000 square foot warehouse and shopfront gallery in exchange for the company attracting a steady stream of visitors to what was then a somewhat forbidding neighborhood. Counts, Stern and Diebes were joined by resident artists Michael Anderson, Tom Fruin and Jeff Sugg to create four large-scale performance installations and mount numerous exhibitions and off-site events over the following five years. To SEA: Another Ocean, a performance installation for four performers and 500 blue umbrellas, marked the official opening of the space in September 1997.

After creating his second work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art promenade, The Making of a Mountain, in 1995, Counts directed and designed a series of performances and installations from 1996 to 1997 in multiple indoor and outdoor locations in Manhattan and in touring residencies in Thailand and Japan, gathering a growing circle of artistic collaborators along the way.

Counts was born and raised in New York City, the son of Carolyn Counts Fox (née Lawler) and Dr. Robert Milton Counts. He studied Theatre and Economics at Skidmore College from 1988 to 1993, where he created The Life and Times of Lewis Carroll, a performance that was both an abstract re-interpretation of Alice In Wonderland and a poetic performative portrait of Lewis Carroll. At Skidmore, Counts also created the "Failure Series", an open forum of experimental performance concepts that continued after he graduated under the leadership of collaborators Ian Belton and Yehuda Duenyas. The series included a wide range of performance, theatrical, operatic and scenic elements spread over several acres of Skidmore Campus which anticipated much of his later work with immersive performance installations and theater.

Michael Counts (born May 25, 1970) is an American stage director and designer of theater, opera and immersive performance events and creator and producer of large-scale public art installations and digital platforms. He has been described in The New York Times as a “mad genius” and “a master of immersive theatre”, and in Variety as having the "grandest ambitions" of leading pioneers of immersive theater in New York City.

The title of 1839 (1999) refers to the year photography was invented, and was conceived as a dream of Daguerre “in which a child, in the guise of Oedipus, wanders through a landscape peopled by narcissists in love with their own photographed images.” The landscape was a kinetic collage of multi-layered, allusive imagery. There were yet more three-dimensional reproductions of artworks – Manet’s Olympia, a large classical still life, a cat from a Balthus painting – interwoven with invented scenarios. A hermaphrodite appeared in different guises, at one point dressed in a sailor costume identical to the ones adorning a statue of a child and worn by the Oedipus character. An armadillo puppet stood up on its hind legs to reveal a naked young woman on whose skin an image of the solar system was projected. There were multiple scenes involving a surreally distanced Oedipal coupling of two actors who recited a combination of Sophocles and invented texts. At one point, the Oedipus figure shot arrows across the full throw of the backstage area at a circle of light as the Jocasta character looked on.