CHANGING LIVES WITH HIS VISION AND MOVEMENT YASHA JACOB MICHELSON

The world is fortunate to have people like the talented Yasha Jacob Michelson

Every once in a while we are lucky enough to hear about someone who is truly multi-talented and a powerhouse in the art world. Yasha Jacob Michelson is certainly that someone. He has been in Los Angeles since 1989 and was born in Georgia, USSR. From there he lived in Latvia, then moved to Israel and finally came to the United States. He has such an interesting resumé and background that it’s really difficult to start at any one place, so we’ll just go through it and try to touch on the high points of this artistic man’s accomplishments.

 

Yasha is probably most famous for Dance Jazzo that he created and developed from all styles of dance. He simply says that Dance Jazzo is “how the body moves,” but when you see it on his website or in person at his Mimoda Studio, you’ll agree that it is much more that just how the body moves. Dance Jazzo is Dance Biomechanics, which means “how the body moves when it dances” but in the hands of Yasha Jacob Michelson it is transformed into something a hundred times more meaningful and a thousand times more powerful.

 

Dance Jazzo is a movement language with its beautiful slogan “aesthetic resistance to gravity” encompasses Dance Jazzo in slow motion meditative aerobics and has branched out to be a unique  health & lifestyle  optimization system called Jazzo Bodysophy that is not only fun but can improve the participant’s (the dancers) health and mental well being. Yasha developed this Jazzo Bodysophy (health & lifestyle optimization system) which has derived from development Dance Jazzo biomechanics  together with  Theater Jazzo (Dance performance based ensemble ) at his Mimoda Dance Studio in Los Angeles.

 

Yasha became attracted to movement aesthetics when he studied at Israel’s Wingate Institute. He was a Greco-Roman wrestler when he entered but when he was invited to join the dance department because of a shortage of male dancers he gladly accepted and traded his wrestling shoes for dance gear. After three years of intense training in all styles of dance, he decided to leave the world of dance and he dived into fine art, photography, fashion and design and then into filmmaking. As we said earlier, Yasha has many accomplishments and one of them was conquering the Cannes Film Festival with his first feature film, Sonhos de Peixe, which won the Prix Regards Jeune in 2006. Just getting into the festival is a major achievement, but Mr. Michelson won a once in a lifetime award there, which tells us something about his determination and artistic vision.

 

After film, Yasha’s curiosity brought him back to dance where he explored what he called, “Dancing Pantomime.” He became enthralled with dance again and combined physical theater and movement with Dancing Pantomime and called it “Mime & Dance.” The name soon became “Mimodance,” and then finally “Mimoda,” which stuck. Yasha took over the famous dancers studio and renamed it Mimoda Studio " House of Jazzo in Los Angeles, and that is where Yasha and his students train, rehearse and put on dance events for the public.

Classes are held several times a week and taught by Yasha himself. 

To find out more info,go to: 

www.dancejazzo.org.