Michael Toppings – Rehearsals for dying in colour
Dec. 14 2026 ⇾ Jan. 03 2027 (Monday – Sunday)
© Jeremy Toppings
Biography
Michael Toppings is a text-based artist, bookworm, self-identified etymologist, and humanist who bends writing into performance. Over the past several decades, his practice has spanned readings, performances, theatrical works, and in situ installations presented in galleries, theatres, and non-conventional spaces—each designed to unsettle familiar systems of meaning and prompt a reimagining of how we might make sense of the world. His work is defined by a distinct aesthetic—rooted in a refined DIY ethos that bridges the mundane and the sublime while exploring what connects us as human beings and leading perhaps to a sustained engagement with and between artists and audiences.
Projects often begin with a single word, husked and stripped of and for meaning as a point of departure. This process is driven by the understanding that “all definition involves exclusion; in determining what a thing is, we also define what it is not.”
Notable projects include Male Herd, The House Project, Single Dwelling Monologues, and A Diary of a Neighborhood.
Project Details
Rehearsals for Dying in Colour is an interdisciplinary project anchored in grief with the eulogy as its predominant form of expression – unfolding across the literary, the visual, and the performative arts. There are four distinct yet interwoven parts (a volume of self-penned eulogies, a stage adaptation to be presented at La Chapelle, a reading of the original manuscript in an actual funeral home, and a self-published bookwork) – each iteration is grounded in grief, absence, and bereavement (and its accompanying disequilibrium). It is also about making space in order to speak the unspeakable, to illuminate the unseen. At its core is catharsis. There is no painless way to become oneself after being deconstructed by loss. There is only waiting (William Borzt).