Michael Portnoy from SAKANAMA's "I KNOW WHO I AM!", 2005

Bob Dylan and Portnoy (right) at the 1998 Grammy Awards

Michael Portnoy is a New York based multimedia artist, choreographer, musician, actor and director of behavior. Image File history File linksMetadata No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File linksMetadata No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is a Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Award-winning American singer-songwriter, author, musician, and poet who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. ... Grammy Award statuette The Grammy Awards, presented by the Recording Academy (an association of Americans professionally involved in the recorded music industry) for outstanding achievements in the recording industry, is one of four major music awards shows held annually in the United States (the Billboard Music Awards, the American Music... NY redirects here. ... Multimedia Artists These are artists using a range of media to communicate their art, such as installations, rooms, sound and visual effects. ... Choreography (also known as dance composition) is the art of making structures in which movement occurs, the term composition may also refer to the navigation or connection of these movement structures. ...

Performance Artist

Michael Portnoy was born in Washington, D.C. and studied comparative literature and creative writing at Vassar College and theater at The National Theater Institute. After moving to New York City, he formed several short lived experimental theater groups and then began concentrating on solo performance. His early performance works, such as Gymnastics and Schizophrenia, and 5teen3sy: Kicking Games of Lip, were antic and unpredictable, and characterized by dense language play, song and movement fragments and rapid transformations of character. In the mid 90's, Portnoy started to perform in venues associated with the new "Alternative Comedy" scene, in the company of comedians such as Sarah Silverman, Upright Citizens Brigade, Marc Maron and Louis C.K. His wild, raw theatrical performances, which occasionally interrupted and challenged other comedians on stage, prompted the press to describe him as "the bad boy of comedy", (Time Out NY) and "the next Andy Kaufman" (Page Six, New York Post). Simultaneously, Portnoy started working as a dancer for NY choreographer Koosil-Ja Hwang, and as an actor in commercials, music videos and short films. He also sang and performed his own operatic, electro-progressive-rock music as XAR, and in the band The Liquid Tapedeck. Vassar College is a private, coeducational, highly selective liberal arts college situated in Poughkeepsie, New York. ... ... Page 6 (subtitled Atari Users Magazine, and later known as New Atari User) was an independent British publication aimed at users of Atari computers. ... The New York Post is the 13th-oldest[] newspaper published in the United States and the oldest to have been published continually as a daily. ...

Soy Bomb

For Bob Dylan's performance of "Love Sick" at the 1998 Grammy Awards, Portnoy was hired by the Grammys to stand in the background with other dancers and bob his head to the music to "give Bob a good vibe." Instead, halfway through the performance, Portnoy ripped off his shirt, ran up next to Dylan, and started dancing and contorting spastically with the words Soy Bomb written boldly in black across his chest. Dylan glanced briefly at Portnoy, laughed, and went on playing without missing a beat. Portnoy continued to dance for about 40 seconds, making odd grimaces, his eyes often closed as if in a trance, until security realized he wasn't part of the show and escorted him off-stage. Love Sick is a popular concert feature song, based around a simple, repeating organ riff. ... The 40th Grammy Awards were held on February 25, 1998. ...

When questioned by reporters, Portnoy made statements about being "almost vegetarian", and said that "Soy...represents dense nutritional life. Bomb is, obviously, an explosive destructive force. So, soy bomb is what I think art should be: dense, transformational, explosive life" according to E! and that "he meant Soy Bomb as a "spontaneous explosion of the self" to re-invigorate the currently bland music scene that exists." He has also said that the phrase is a combination of Spanish and English, meaning "the bomb of 'I am'" The Grammy Awards chose not to press charges against Portnoy for the act, but did decline to pay Portnoy's $200 fee for the dancing gig. For animals adapted to eat primarily plants, sometimes referred to as vegetarian animals, see Herbivore. ... Binomial name Glycine max Soybeans (US) or soya beans (UK) (Glycine max) are a high-protein legume (Family Fabaceae) grown as food for both humans and livestock. ... E!: Entertainment Television is an American cable television and direct broadcast satellite network. ...

Public reaction

Many found the incident both strange and amusing, and the event was soon parodied on comedy television shows. It was the subject of skits on Saturday Night Live, where he was portrayed by Will Ferrell, and on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. A few days after the Grammys, TVT Records attempted to capitalize on the event with a website, "Soy Bomb Nation." The website claimed to be the home of a grassroots dadaist anti-corporate movement that had been around for years, and that although Portnoy wasn't officially a member, he was honoring Soy Bomb with his performance. Saturday Night Live (SNL) is a weekly late night 90-minute American comedy-variety show based in New York City which has been broadcast live by NBC on Saturday nights since October 11, 1975. ... John William Will Ferrell (born July 16, 1967[1]) is an Emmy and Golden Globe nominated Irish-American comedian, impressionist and actor who first established himself as a cast member of Saturday Night Live, and has since gone on to a successful film career. ... May 26, 2006 opening monologue of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno The Tonight Show with Jay Leno is the full name of NBCs The Tonight Show hosted by Jay Leno, debuting on May 25, 1992. ... TVT Records is an independent record label located in New York City in the United States. ... A grassroots political movement is one driven by the constituents of a community. ... Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. ...

Soy Bomb truly entered pop culture history and the collective consciousness has not forgotten about the event over time. Strawman, a Washing D.C. based band recorded a song called "Soy Bomb" in 2004. In 2005, the band Eels released a song entitled "Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb" on its album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. When the same performance of "Love Sick" was included on the bonus DVD released with Dylan's 2006 album Modern Times, but with "Soy Bomb" edited out, many people expressed their disappointment. An instrumental called "Soy Bomb" by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives appears as a bonus song in Guitar Hero II. Celebrity Deathmatch also references the event; During a match featuring Bob Dylan, host Nick Diamond's brother, Sid, sneaks into the ring under the guise as referee Mills Lane, but eventually reveals himself by dancing frantically and removing his shirt revealing a "Sid Bomb" tattoo on his back. 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Eels (also sometimes eels or EELS, depending on the album) is an American rock band formed by singer/songwriter Mark Oliver Everett, better known as Mr. ... Blinking Lights and Other Revelations (2005) is a double album by the band Eels. ... DVD (commonly known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc) is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. ... An album is a collection of related audio tracks distributed to the public. ... Modern Times is Bob Dylans 32nd studio album, released on August 29, 2006 by Sony BMG. The album was Dylans third straight (following Time out of Mind and Love and Theft) to be met with nearly universal praise from fans and critics. ... Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives is a rock-and-roll band based in Boston, Massachusetts. ... Guitar Hero II is a music video game and a sequel of Guitar Hero. ... Celebrity Deathmatch is a claymation parody television show that pits celebrities against each other in a wrestling ring, almost always ending in a gruesome death of the celebrity who lost the match. ... Mills Lane As seen on MTVs Celebrity Deathmatch. ...

Portnoy: 1999-present

Portnoy continued to create solo performance works and music but also expanded his practice to include choreography, video, installation, sculpture and relational works, which he describes as "strangergames".

He has presented work in museums, art galleries, theaters and music halls internationally, including: The 2nd Moscow Biennial, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Kitchen, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Gallery, Deitch Gallery, White Box, ACE Gallery, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Roulette, Kling & Bang (Reykjavík), Foksal Gallery Foundation (Warsaw), Kaaitheater (Brussels), Migros Museum (Zurich), Le Comfort Moderne (Poitiers, France) and The National Review of Live Art (Glasgow). Founded in 1971, the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is one of the largest and oldest museums in the United States dedicated solely to contemporary art. ... Location in Iceland Coordinates: Constituency Reykjavík North Reykjavík South Area    - City 274. ... Location within Switzerland   Zürich[?] (German pronunciation IPA: ; usually spelled Zurich in English) is the largest city in Switzerland (population: 366,145 in 2004; population of urban area: 1,091,732) and capital of the canton of Zürich. ... Location within France The town of Poitiers with its many medieval churches, viewed from Les Dunes. Poitiers is a town located in west central France. ...

Portnoy directs Session, a salon on Manhattan's Lower East Side devoted to the exploration of social exchange as an art form. He has worked with choreographers Chamecki Lerner, Maria Hassabi, Koosil-Ja Hwang, and Scott Heron, collaborated with artists Rita Ackermann, David Adamo, Catherine Despont, Theodore Fivel, Agathe Snow, Marianne Vitale, Shoplifter (Hrafnhildur Anrnardottir), Claude Wampler, and musicians Pete Drungle and Sean Lennon. The short film "I KNOW WHO I AM!", produced by SAKANAMA (a collaborative of which he is a member), premiered in The Brooklyn International Film Festival in 2006. ... Categories: Manhattan neighborhoods | Stub ...

External links

• Strangergames: The official website of Michael Portnoy

• Profile In Time Out NY

• Review of "The K Sound", a dance-theater work, in The NY Times