Faye Driscoll describes her dances as being like plays and installations. “Sets are designed to break apart, musical scores are made from performers’ stomps and voices, props are worn, used and reused for fantasy, excess, and loss. Performers sing, fight, frolic and make love in bursts, like rapid fire flipbooks of human emotion. Awkward virtuosic bodies teeter on the edge of high art and slapstick. A viewer feels a rollercoaster of joy, outrage, arousal and discomfort while performers hold a frank gaze that says, “You are me and I am you.” Embarrassment and exhilaration live side by side. I aim for an immersive world of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation. Through performers’ powerful exposure, heightened proximity, and at times physical connection with the audience, viewers feel their own culpability as cocreators of the performance. My work is a rigorously crafted group experience that comes off as improvised, chaotic and spontaneous.”
Faye Driscoll and company in conversation with OSU Department of Art and Department of Dance faculty and students at Ann Hamilton Studio, Columbus, Ohio, following her 2016 residency at Wexner Center for the Arts.
Faye Driscoll, Thank You For Coming work in progress