Faye Driscoll

Faye Driscoll is a Doris Duke Award-winning performance maker who has been hailed as a “startlingly original talent” by The New York Times and “a postmillenium postmodern wild woman” by The Village Voice.
 
She is currently the Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Bessie award and the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award among many others. Her work has been presented at Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, ICA/Boston, MCA Chicago and BAM, and internationally at Theater Bremen (Unusual Symptoms), Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires.

Her most recent performance, Space, was the final live work in her Thank You for Coming trilogy. Space is a moving requiem on art, the body, loss and human connectivity, and was celebrated as “an exhilaratingly personal culmination of the series” by Artforum. In 2020, Faye’s first-ever solo exhibition, Come On In, opened at Walker Art Center, offering gallery-goers an experience of six distinct audio-guided experiences from her series Guided Choreography for the Living and the Dead.

Faye also choreographs for plays and films, including the Broadway production of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, and Josephine Decker’s award-winning feature films Madeline’s Madeline and The Sky is Everywhere.

Returning Choreographic Fellow | February 12 - 19, 2023

Weathering

Returning Choreographic Fellow, Faye Driscoll came back to MANCC from February 12 to 19, 2023 to further develop her work, Weathering.

As Driscoll’s newest work, Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects. Ten performers consisting of dancers, singers, and production crew glacially morph moment to moment on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen and cleave, in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the central, spiraling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking, choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Driscoll and her team of collaborators ask: How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger? Yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact? Can we slow down enough to feel the dust, hurt, howl, absence, spill, plume?

While at MANCC, Driscoll focused this 7-day residency with her performers and design team to further an extended series of highly physicalized explorations that mesh movement, vocalizations and a uniquely designed and tourable mobile stage, which together manifest the work’s conceptual concerns.
 
Driscoll’s residency culminated in an open rehearsal for both the public and FSU School of Dance students and was interactive, incorporating a multiplicity of natural elements as well as singing, movement and props.
Brooklyn-based dancemaker, performer, writer and long-time collaborator with Driscoll, Jesse Zaritt, joined Driscoll in residency for three days as part of MANCC’s Embedded Writers Program serving as writer and seasoned thought partner on the work.
 
Weathering will premiere at New York Live Arts on April 6 – 8 & 13 – 15, 2023.

This residency for Weathering was supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Embedded writer Jesse Zaritt’s participation was supported by the Mellon Foundation. 

Childcare subsidy to two parent/artist collaborators was supported by the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

        

  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Jennifer Nugent
  • Faye Driscoll
  • Kara Brody and James Barrett
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Amy Gernux and Jo Warren
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Jennifer Nugent and Cory Seals
  • MANCC interns Callee Egan and Sophia Pfitzenmaier
  • Shayla-Vie Jenkins and Sophia Pfitzenmaier
  • Jennifer Nugent and Kara Brody
  • Jennifer Nugent
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Embedded Writer Jesse Zaritt
  • Set Designer Nicholas Vaughn
  • Rehearsal for <em>Weathering</em>
  • Jesse Zaritt and Faye Driscoll
  • Faye Driscoll during open rehearsal
  • <em>Weathering</em> open rehearsal
  • Shayla-Vie Jenkins
  • James Barrett and Jennifer Nugent
  • <em>Weathering</em> open rehearsal
Collaborators in Residence: James Barrett, Kara Brody, Jennifer Nugent, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Cory Seals, Eliza Tappan, Carlo Antonio, Villanueva, Jo Warren[Performers], Amy Gernux [Performer & Choreographic Assistant], Nicholas Vaughn [Environment & Set Designer], Emily Vizina [Production Stage Manager], Hannah Emerson [Producer], Jesse Zaritt [Writer]

Choreographic Fellow | March 16 – April 1, 2011

You're Me

While in residence at MANCC, Faye Driscoll, collaborator Jesse Zaritt, and composer Brandon Wolcott with cellist Emil Abramyam researched and began the development of You're Me (formerly titled Not, Not...), a show about the ways we are constantly made-up and un-done by each other. 

During her residency Driscoll engaged students, scholars and local musicians as a means of exploring the question, 'What are the mythical, unstable and liberating processes that shake up the notion of self and lead to transformation?' Exploring both the longing to attain a solid person hood as a stable and powerful state and the longing to transcend self completely to become no-thing, someone else or another creature. Driscoll asks, ‘What is the power of real transformation? A snake shedding its skin versus the contemporary botox phenomenon. How do these actions express the same impulse?’

You're Me Flipbook available on Vimeo.

You're Me premiered at The Kitchen April 12 - 21, 2012

  • Driscoll and Zaritt explore the question, ‘What is the power of real transformation?’ with FSU Students.
  • Jesse Zaritt  with students Scott Curley, Hope Gaines, Shiloh Hodges, Jamie Melaragno and Katrina Reid.
  • FSU School of Dance Student Katie Lupke works with Faye Driscoll.
  • Faye Driscoll talks with student Katrina Reid.
  • Faye Driscoll at the conclusion of the transformation Entrypoint.

Collaborators in Residence: Jesse Zarrit [performer], Brandon Walcott [composer/sound designer], Emil Abramyam [musician]. Slideshow photos by Al Hall.

Featured Artist

Faye Driscoll

Weathering
February 22 - 24
Carolina Performing
Arts, UNC Chapel Hill

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