Gallatin’s Mickey Sanchez Aims to Understand the Reality of Performance

By Asher Weiss

      Growing up in Roxbury, New Jersey, Mickey Sanchez developed an early affinity for music. He studied voice and upright bass, performing classical, jazz, and rock music. He contemplated going to school for music performance, but decided that that would be too limiting. Instead, he enrolled in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study because it allowed him to align his personal and academic goals.
      It took several years to refine those goals, but after studying anthropology, performance, writing, and environmental studies, among other subjects, Sanchez settled upon a concentration: performance and constructed reality.
      “I’m interested in conscious reality, that is, constructed reality,” says the senior, who graduates today.
      More specifically, he is interested in the reality that is manufactured during an artistic performance. This interest was born, in part, from courses such as “Narratives of African Civilization,” which inspired him to explore artistic media beyond music. He began to write poetry and short stories and was eventually one of six students chosen for the Gallatin Writing Program’s Great World Texts project. As a mentor, he found himself offering constructive criticism to a boy writing a poem inspired by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Weep Not, Child.
      A summer course in Himalayan Buddhist art and architecture led him to travel through India, where he cultivated a passion for visual art and put his environmental courses to use, writing about farming techniques in northern India. But, ultimately, Sanchez’s interests all led back to performance.
      As a performing artist liaison for the Gallatin Arts Festival, he was instrumental in helping events run smoothly. His own piece in the festival combined video, theater, and dance, and demonstrated, he says, “that each performance necessarily creates its own reality.”
      When not on stage, or studying it, Sanchez writes songs on guitar, and recently co-founded Small Boy Pants, a record label devoted to promoting original indie music. While he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, he’s not sure exactly what will come after that. For someone interested in constructed reality, it seems likely that he’ll have no trouble figuring it out.