Michael Counts (born in 1970) is an American stage director and designer of theater, opera, and immersive performance events and a creator and producer of large-scale public art installations and digital platforms. The New York Times has described him as a "mad genius" and "a master of immersive theater", and in Variety as having the "grandest ambitions" of leading pioneers of immersive theater in New York City. Counts' former New York theatre company, GAle GAtes, was documented and published in a 2022 Routledge monograph of the same name ("The Immersive Theatre of GAle GAtes.)
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: an evening performance in a series of walk-through installations in a 40,000 square foot Brooklyn warehouse; and 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.
Counts is the Founding Director of Counts Projects and produces his work in New York City. He has served as a consultant for Disney theme parks and other global entertainment and media companies. He was a co-founder of GAle GAtes et al., a performance and visual art company initially resident with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) at various locations in Manhattan and on tour in Asia before taking up residence in the Brooklyn warehouse.
Early life and education
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.
His most notable influences from his time at Skidmore were Gautam Dasgupta and his then wife, Bonnie Marranca, co-founders of the PAJ: Performing Arts Journal. Counts went on to study with Dasgupta off and on for the next 20 years.
Career
Theater and Performance
In his formative years, Counts was drawn to the work of theater and visual artists who forged idiosyncratic and often fiercely independent artistic paths, including Robert Wilson, Reza Abdoh, Richard Foreman, Joseph Cornell, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, and Gertrude Stein. A common thread was the way the work of these artists was fueled by a subconscious or non-literal dynamic generated through collisions and confluences along the intersections of visual art, literature, music, sound, and live performance.
After graduating from Skidmore, Counts founded the C & Hammermill Company and Exhibition Space in a 100 ft.-long warehouse in Saratoga Springs. Counts collaborated with company members on a series of installations, site-specific performances and guerrilla artworks.
When he moved back to New York City, he co-founded GAle GAtes et al.
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.