Michael Portnoy

Michael Portnoy is an American multimedia artist, choreographer, musician, actor and curator. He calls himself a "Director of Behavior". He has been described in Art in America as "one of the most interesting performance artists anywhere".

Portnoy was born in Washington, D.C., and studied comparative literature and creative writing at Vassar College and theater at the National Theater Institute at The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. 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 1990s, Portnoy regularly performed in venues such as Surf Reality and Luna Lounge's weekly show "Eating It", the epicenter of New York's "Alternative Comedy" scene. His wild and abstract theatrical performances, which occasionally interrupted and challenged other comedians on stage, prompted Time Out New York to describe him as "the bad boy of comedy", and The New York Post to dub him "the next Andy Kaufman". At the same time, Portnoy started working as a dancer for the New York choreographer Koosil-Ja Hwang, and as an actor. He also sang and performed his own operatic, electro-progressive-rock music as XAR, and with the band The Liquid Tapedeck.

For Bob Dylan's performance of "Love Sick" at the 1998 Grammy Awards, Portnoy was hired by Dylan's production company to stand in the background with other dancers and groove to the music to "give Bob a good vibe". Instead, halfway through the performance, Portnoy ripped off his shirt, ran next to Dylan, and started dancing and contorting spastically with the two-word poem "Soy Bomb" written across his chest. When questioned by reporters, Portnoy explained the poem's meaning: "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 Entertainment Weekly and that "he meant Soy Bomb as a 'spontaneous explosion of the self' to re-invigorate the current music scene. He has also said that the phrase is a combination of Spanish and English, meaning "the bomb of 'I am'". The Grammy's chose not to press charges against Portnoy for the act, but he was not paid the $200 fee for the gig. The Grammy event was parodied on Saturday Night Live, where he was portrayed by Will Ferrell, and on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In 2004, the band Strawman had the track "Soy Bomb" on their album American Idle in reference to the incident. The following year, the band Eels had the track "Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb" on the double-disc album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. In 2016, the TV show Broad City parodied Soy Bomb with a performance artist character played by musician Har Mar Superstar.

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