Mar 3, 2013 ... become beasts in a battle with one another, who turn into two people ..... work,
You're Me is being performed at The Kitchen through April 21st.
FAYE DRISCOLL
Faye Driscoll, Choreographer/Artistic Director, Faye Driscoll Group 71 Fourth Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11217 FAYEDRISCOLL.COM
[email protected] (646) 404-3862
Faye Driscoll WHAT THEY’RE SAYING...
“Ms. Driscoll is fascinating in that she makes such utterly original work. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before, nor can you imagine thinking it up.” - Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times
“Faye Driscoll is the future.” - Elizabeth Zimmer, Metro
“Driscoll understands that at the heart of live theater are emotional distances (perspective, we might call it if this were a painting). She beams a light on theatrical self-fashioning, and lets you feel the scraps of being fluttering in the dark.” - Apollinaire Scherr, Arts Journal
“...the most promising performing artist of her generation.” - Natalie Axton, The Weekly Standard
“Faye Driscoll is a postmillenium, postmodern wild woman. A wild woman with a scrupulous sense of form that she tweaks into eye-opening weirdness. Ferocious, hilarious, and disturbing...” - Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
Biography Faye Driscoll is a Bessie-award winning choreographer who has been called “a startlingly original talent” by the New York Times and “the most promising performing artist of her generation” by the Weekly Standard. She has choreographed 4 eveninglength works with commissions from The Kitchen, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Dance Theater Workshop, American Dance Festival and HERE Arts Center. Her work has been supported by a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Creative Capital award, a 2013 Foundation for Contemporary Art grant, a National Dance Project NEFA production and touring award, multi-year support from the Jerome Foundation and the Greenwall Foundation, and a LMCC Fund for Creative Communities grant. Driscoll has received commissions from the Zenon Dance Company and Barnard College, was a 2011 Choreographic Fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and an Artist-in-Residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and Headlands Center for the Arts. She has collaborated extensively with theater artists including Young Jean Lee, Cynthia Hopkins, Taylor Mac, Jennifer Miller and NTUSA. Her video work was exhibited in Younger than Jesus, a triennial at the New Museum. Driscoll has been an adjunct professor at Bard College and NYU’s Playwrights Horizon’s Theater School. Her work has toured to the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Fusebox Festival, UCLA, the ICA/Boston, and CounterPULSE, with upcoming tours to the American Dance Festival and The Yard.
Artistic Statement I am a choreographer who strives to investigate new forms of theatrical experience aimed to provoke feeling, stimulate the senses, and activate the mind. I am obsessed with the basic problem of being “somebody” in a world of other “somebodies,” and in my work I attempt to pull apart this daily performance of self. I do this by enacting it in excess, blowing it up to the extreme in order to reveal its edges and create more space, more possibility for who we can be. Drawing on familiar images and archetypal scenes—such as poses from classical art, or the physicality of people in extreme states, from torture to religious rapture—I seek to animate the tension between image and felt experience. Strutting drag queens morph into a mother bird protecting and feeding her baby, who become beasts in a battle with one another, who turn into two people pushed to the brink of their relationship. My intention is to open up a space between extremes—where there is uncertainty and ambiguity, where falsehoods and truths mix. I often seduce the viewer with the representational so they might think, “I know what is happening, and who those people are,” then flip things on their head so that there is a loss of identity, and the viewer is left in the uncomfortable attempt to relocate themselves within that loss. I create manically choreographed physical and aural scores from these scenes and images, making them tightly constructed and difficult to get through. Through this labor, I hope to allow for a kind of transformation of both the performer and the viewer—to liberate the id, the erotic, and the fantastical. I use my work to convey the world I want to create, while grappling with the difficulties of negotiating the one we live in.
Recent History You’re Me
The Joyce Theater - June 2011, Section 1 Premier Chicago Dancing Festival - Chicago - August 2011 The Kitchen - NYC - April 2012, World Premier UCLA’s Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater - Los Angeles - April 2012 The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) - Boston - November 2012 American Realness at Abrons Arts Center - NYC - January 2013 CounterPULSE - San Francisco - March 2013 The Wexner Center for the Arts - Columbus - March 2013 American Dance Festival - Durham - June 2013 The Yard - Martha’s Vineyard - July 2013
There is so much mad in me
Dance Theater Workshop - NYC - March 2010, World Premier Dance Theater Workshop - NYC - September 2010, Remount The Fusebox Festival - Austin - April 2011
837 Venice Boulevard
HERE Arts Center - NYC - November 2008, World Premier Paul Mellon Arts Center - Wallingford - January 2009 Hillsborough Community College - Tampa - January 2009 The Wexner Center for the Arts - Columbus - November 2010
You’re Me SELECTED PRESS
“You’re Me tackles [identity and gender roles] with such savagery and convoluted wit that an evening at The Kitchen... is a bracing experience.” - Deborah Jowitt
“Ms. Driscoll is fascinating in that she makes such utterly original work. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before, nor can you imagine thinking it up. [...] Ms. Driscoll looks like she could eat up and spit out the world, and you want to be watching as she does.” - Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times
“[Ms. Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt] keep us wondering what they’ll do next and whether the mischief might spill over the fourth wall. [...] It’s characteristic of Ms. Driscoll’s choreography that the seeming anarchy is built into a tight structure of recurrence. It’s true to form that underneath the silliness [...] lies a serious view of the power of sex. [...] Craft blooms into artistry in the way that oranges, which have been stuffed into clothing to exaggerate sexual characteristics, sweetly become the means of reconciliation.” - Brian Seibert, The New York Times
“You’re Me is a sordid and enduring corporeal journey that unfolds in a duet form between Faye and dancer Jesse Zaritt... Between them, they create a high-speed exploration of the inevitable roles, representations, images, stories, fantasies, and emotions that are bound up in the very act of relating. You’re Me is a frenetic duet that asks us if it is possible to have an attachment to “life” that is not prescribed by the limits of “my life.” The piece is a staged attempt to transcend one’s own subjectivity through creating intimacy and extreme states like ecstasy and agony, while simultaneously revealing the impossibility of ever fully escaping one’s self. Can I abandon my subjectivity inside of yours? How far can we go? You’re Me is a relational test of limits and endurance.” - Cassie Peterson, BOMBlog
There is so much mad in me SELECTED PRESS
“Whenever There is so much mad in me sank into this delicious confusion between acting out and holding back – between the danger and the sweetness of ‘only connecting’ – I wished the show could last all night.” - Apollinaire Scherr, Financial Times
“Driscoll... has a reputation for serious provocation. She makes spectators squirm, and there’s an uneasy edge to the laughter she elicits in exploring our dark, pent-up, raging urges.” - Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
“The vignettes that unfold in this space—funny, frightening, and familiar—seem invoked by a magic mirror that, as in fairy tales, distorts the truth so that it can be seen more clearly.“ - Mary Love Hodges, Dance Magazine
“There is so much mad in me takes everything Faye Driscoll has worked with and binds it together to create an emotional monsterpiece, a beautiful rollercoaster of feeling and sensation.” - Quinn Batson, Offoffoff
“It’s rare and refreshing to experience a work that forces its cast and audience to be so emotionally and psychologically vulnerable. That’s exactly what Driscoll demands in There is so much mad in me. The result is thrilling, agonizing, mind-blowing, and revealing.” - Evan Namerow, Dancing Perfectly Free
837 Venice Blvd. SELECTED PRESS
“‘837 Venice Blvd.’ confirmed Ms. Driscoll as one of the most original talents on the contemporary dance scene. Evoking the raw intensity of childhood experience by way of showbiz razzle-dazzle, she suggests — through movement both virtuosic and clunky — that we are only a scary hairsbreadth away from our past.” - Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times
“For masterfully invoking a collective past by exploring the raw intensity of childhood; for using text, movement, and song to uncover the falsity of the performance of identity; and for calling forth the true emotions beneath the surface, a 2009 New York Dance and Performance Award goes to Faye Driscoll’s 837 Venice Boulevard.” - New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Award Citation
“To keep being somebody, you’re always giving someone up. ‘837 Venice Boulevard’ doesn’t just depict that wrenching routine, it performs it. Driscoll understands that at the heart of live theater are emotional distances (perspective, we might call it if this were a painting). She beams a light on theatrical self-fashioning, and lets you feel the scraps of being fluttering in the dark.” - Apollinaire Scherr, Arts Journal
“837 emerges as a wild, ferocious, wrenching, and hilarious piece of dance theater...” - Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
Stripped/Dressed: Faye Driscoll Mark Rifkin, This Week in New York, March 3, 2013 92nd St. Y, Buttenwieser Hall 395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St. Sunday, March 3, $24, 3:00 For her “Stripped/Dressed” presentation at the 92nd St. Y, New York-based choreographer Faye Driscoll changed the general format, with spectacular results. Part of the Harkness Dance Festival, “Stripped/Dressed” invites choreographers to first stage a piece without adornment — no costumes, props, etc. — then discuss the work and show it again, the second time with theatrical accoutrements. Driscoll, whose previous work includes You’re Me, There is so much mad in me, and 837 Venice Blvd, transformed the already intimate Buttenwieser Hall into a warm, friendly gathering, with two rows of seats surrounding all four sides of the center Marley floor. Driscoll first discussed the genesis of her untitled work-in-progress, which examines such themes as mirroring, group ritual, and the interdependence of audience and performer, being sure to walk around the space so she could get close to everyone. Then the five dancers (Giulia Carotenuto, Jeremy Pheiffer, Anna Marie Shogren, Brandon Washington, and Nikki Zialcita) — who had never before performed in public for Driscoll or with one another; they had been hired through auditions in December — began a thirtyfive-minute excerpt, wearing regular clothes, with no music and the house lights on throughout, in which they virtually were always in contact with one another as foot touched foot, fingers stroked hair, hands brushed chest, lips kissed neck, elbow banged shoulder, and head popped through legs in a dazzling display of emotion and physicality. The dancers also interacted with the audience via direct eye contact, the exchange of random objects, and touch as well. It’s like the craziest game of Twister you’ve ever seen, except taken to much deeper, provocative, metaphysical levels while, as is Driscoll’s wont, changing many of the rules. The choreographer pointed out that since the work is still in its early phases, some movements are likely to be expanded for the final piece, while others will probably disappear, but audience members after the show could be heard saying that they hope she doesn’t change a thing.
Dressing Up and Discovering What’s in the Toy Box Brian Seibert, The New York Times, April 15, 2012
It’s a little worrisome to discover that the kids have emptied out the costume trunk. So many props should keep them occupied, and maybe they’ll entertain the grownups while they’re at it, but the situation is already messy, and it’s bound to get messier. Faye Driscoll’s duet “You’re Me,” which began a two-week run at the Kitchen on Thursday, opens with Ms. Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt so covered in random costume parts that pieces slip off at the slightest move. And things do get messier from there, sticky-stuff-and-spray-paint messy. Messy is how Ms. Driscoll likes it. This isn’t the first of her works to suggest children at play. “837 Venice Blvd,” her breakthrough dance of 2008, took on identity in the form of a clubhouse game of let’s pretend. But Ms. Driscoll wasn’t in that one or her 2010 follow-up, “There is so much mad in me.” She’s an appealingly enthusiastic performer. (On Thursday she was having so much fun that she could hardly keep a straight face.) So is Mr. Zaritt. Neither leaves the stage for the
Brian Seibert, The New York Times, April 15, 2012, page 2 duet’s 90-minute duration. As in “837” the role playing is childish in manner but adult in connotation. The first section is a jittery collage of gender stereotypes, poses from classical statuary and romantic scenarios, all twisted into comically awkward balances. Relevant idioms are literalized: She eats out of his hand; he mimes taking her cherry. She coaches him on how to act out a sentimental moment (a proffered rose followed by an embrace), and they do it over until he does it right. Anxiety about doing it right, whatever “right” means, is a core theme in Ms. Driscoll’s dances and a principal source of comedy. As much as Ms. Driscoll and Mr. Zaritt perform for each other, they perform for the audience too. They smirk at us. They flash us looks expressing disbelief in what a partner is up to. They look to us for approval. Ms. Driscoll and Mr. Zaritt are endearing enough to make this section amusing, though few would wish it to last longer. Escalating messiness is required to maintain the pitch of excitement, so out comes the powder and paint. It’s imperative that they keep us wondering what they’ll do next and whether the mischief might spill over the fourth wall. Yet it’s characteristic of Ms. Driscoll’s choreography that the seeming anarchy is built into a tight structure of recurrence. It’s true to form that underneath the silliness — the game of spitting objects into the other person’s mouth; Ms. Driscoll’s riding Mr. Zaritt’s back like a cowboy, gripping his ample curls — lies a serious view of the power of sex. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, and somebody does. Craft blooms into artistry in the way that oranges, which have been stuffed into clothing to exaggerate sexual characteristics, sweetly become the means of reconciliation. Snacktime is a balm. The dance should end there, but it doesn’t. The kids want to keep playing, and it’s both poignant and exasperating that they don’t know when to stop. Ms. Driscoll can be proud of the mess she’s made, but you have to wonder who’s going to clean up.
Jesse Zaritt on Faye Driscoll’s “You’re Me” Jesse Zaritt, Culturebot, January 17, 2013
We pushed our bodies beyond their capacity in every rehearsal, our senses of self were similarly driven far beyond the point of familiarity; I became other to myself. Faye is fascinated by the relational construction of self, the behavioral adjustments produced in any new interaction. But there is more to her work than a surface investigation of the continuity of the performative self. What is at stake in Faye’s work – especially the duet You’re Me – is a question of how far the performance of self can be extended. What kind of radical intervention could break open a space in the social fabric that will give us back some choice, the possibility to be other than who we have been conditioned to be? What is the impact of enacting this rupture? What if choreographed performance can help us imagine a new field of possibility for self-realization? What if we don’t know, or can’t even imagine who or what we’d like to become; what choreographic and performative methodologies might help us imagine and then enact extraordinary, unrealized entities? Faye’s work proposes that it would take heroic acts of abandon, catastrophic physicality, manic/hypertrophic embodiment of gender stereotypes and meticulous structure to achieve transformation (to enact the extraordinary). You’re Me also demands of its performers a profound and dangerous union; it is from a constantly shifting relationship that the chaos, failure and promise of transformation emerges. Faye has constructed a ritual of togetherness whose very inscription and repetition in live performance enacts a devastating and exquisite metamorphosis of the performer’s bodies (my self, our selves). You’re me – this is as much about Faye and I (and now Aaron) as it is about the relationship between audience and performers. You – the viewers – are us, the performers. This experiential identification instigates reflection, flux, a disavowal of stasis.
Jesse Zaritt, Culturebot, January 17, 2013, page 2 You’re Me is structured to showcase a mosaic of representations of archetypal male, female, and mythic-beast characters. The level of detail in this choreography is both maddening and extravagant, and the specificity is important. We try again and again to convince every cell in our bodies that we can be in one moment Adam and Eve, in the next a warrior princess, a baby bird, a wolf-lizard amalgam – It is our failure to perfectly enact these tropes that create a generative friction. Our imperfection agitates these containers of idealized embodiment we can’t quite fit ourselves inside. You’re Me ruptures the seams that try to enclose us in the exertion toward perfection, a settled singularity of identification. Early in our process, Faye expressed a desire for us to look the same at some point in the work. More than enacting “twins,” she ultimately wanted us to become each other. It started with the external: we both wore the same red shorts and blue t-shirts and had on matching shaggy, short, blond wigs. We named each wig Chad. We started to improvise. We weren’t just trying to mirror each other, we were trying to fully become the other person. Every subtle facial movement or tiny body gesture was instantly perceived, translated into sensation, and then performed back; the performance of our selves began to overlap. If I started to smile, Faye would instantly smile back at me, her face distorting to match her perception of me smiling. Immediately upon seeing her face, I would try to smile back at her, becoming a reflection of the distortion of my own smile. This process of simultaneous, anticipatory and amplified matching was hysterically funny to us. We danced and babbled and sang and laughed for an hour. This process became an anchor of our improvisational practice, we named it “chadding.” Sadly, chadding never made it into the final version of You’re Me, but it encapsulates the yearning for transformation that fuels this work. Ultimately, Faye and I failed to become each other – but through this relational effort, we each became something, someone else. Together, we created a different way for both of us to be in the world. Even though chadding is absurd and fleeting, it offers a real moment of delightful escape, a window into a different self made possible only by the complex interdependency of one person with an other. And, like all Faye’s choreographic work, it requires an intense discipline and commitment. The lightness is born out of a deep physical attention, an unswerving empathic sensitivity to the totality of another’s experience. “We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.“ -Richard Avedon Dancing changes me. I feel it: my cells re-organizing themselves, tissue tearing and healing – getting stronger or weaker, and at the deepest level – my structure shifting – bones gliding, degrading. Movement costs the body. Dancing reminds me that I am never the same. The body is always in a state of change, but it is a dancing body that highlights, accelerates and marks this constant process in movement. For me, the affirmation of change through the act of dancing is glorious. In movement, I am unfixed, always different. Paradoxically, I feel most like myself when I am moving. Dance teaches that the me I think I am is not so stable, not so constant. In Faye’s work the unfixed dancing body meets the radically unstable performative self. You’re Me proposes a profound relationship between materiality and performativity: As partners in this creative process, the stakes were high for us. I pushed my body beyond its capacity in every rehearsal, my sense of self was similarly driven far beyond the point of familiarity; I became other to myself. Wonderful things happened to me. I kept expanding.
Jesse Zaritt, Culturebot, January 17, 2013, page 3 I demolished walls that kept me from doing things I thought were not possible or allowed. This is the most power I’ve ever felt in my life: the power to become anything, anyone – and to have – no matter what – the support or better yet the challenge of this other body alongside me – rooting for me, pushing me further. I was and am desperate for this freedom: I want access to an experiential totality of myself – an immeasurable, gaping, chaotic, ecstatic fullness and emptiness all at once. We enabled each other. The end result cost us. Our bodies: we are instruments at once profoundly, painfully limited and completely unbound.
Faye Driscoll’s You’re Me: An Invitation. A Demand. A Descent. Cassie Peterson, BOMBlog, April 18, 2012
I met Faye Driscoll back in 2002 at some house party in San Francisco’s Mission District. In that cliché, smalltalk-at-a-party way, we quickly discovered that our birthdays fall on the same date, but that she’s a Sagittarius and I’m a Scorpio; I’ve yet to sort out the logic in this “fact.” At the time of our first meeting, I was busy putting my-self through college and she was busy finding her-self after graduating from NYU and dancing in Doug Varone’s company for a stint. I was unbearably young and naïve and just beginning to take an interest in movement and performance practices. I was cobbling together my own amateurish understanding of dance history and was primarily engaging dance with a cool, cerebral distance before Faye swept in and introduced me to a whole new visceral vocabulary. Faye’s early-career, Bay Area DIY-style choreography was an unapologetic declaration of the depraved. Her work was and continues to be a modernist refusal of form, a postmodern refusal of narrative, and a post-postmodern reclamation of both and of everything. Her work gives space and permission for the grotesque. The bizarre. The unsayable. Faye showed me that a dance performance could leave me feeling cold and disemboweled. Assaulted. Seduced. And confused. She showed me that dance could actually reflect my
Cassie Peterson, BOMBlog, April 18, 2012, page 2 personal realities, my identities, my own secret conflicts, and cellular vibrations. Her dances invite me to find myself in them. Now, ten years later, Faye’s newest work, You’re Me is being performed at The Kitchen through April 21st. You’re Me is a sordid and enduring corporeal journey that unfolds in a duet form between Faye and dancer Jesse Zaritt. Faye has re-entered her work as a performer after several years of directing from the outside. Between them, they create a high-speed exploration of the inevitable roles, representations, images, stories, fantasies, and emotions that are bound up in the very act of relating. You’re Me is a frenetic duet that asks us if it is possible to have an attachment to “life” that is not prescribed by the limits of “my life.” The piece is a staged attempt to transcend one’s own subjectivity through creating intimacy and extreme states like ecstasy and agony, while simultaneously revealing the impossibility of ever fully escaping one’s self. Can I abandon my subjectivity inside of yours? How far can we go? You’re Me is a relational test of limits and endurance. The piece opens with a purposely-overstated scene of abundance and idolatry. Faye and Jesse are cloaked in brightly colored, multi-layered robes, with fruit languidly hanging from their limbs. They appear like beautiful gods, elevated above the stage, above their audience and congregation. The scene produces a sensorial oversaturation that reminds me of a religious ceremony or ritual. A puja. Flowers. Fruit. Fire. These are two deities, decadently adorned and adored. But as the performance progresses, their accoutrements slowly begin to fall away, leaving the dancers’ simple human forms exposed. Revealed. What ensues is an intense and rapid descent, a fall from grace. The dancers descend from the heavens to the earth, losing touch with their higher power, but finding a lower one in the ground, in the mud. It is beastly. Reptilian. It is within each other. It is the beginning and the end of all of us. In this way, You’re Me feels like human evolution, in reverse. Our history on rewind. Or humanity, undone. After reassuming their more earth-bound forms, Faye and Jesse make wild gestures to move across an empty space, together. Through these phrases, they both function as the other’s constant reference point, making strange seductive orbits around one another’s energetic openings and closings. They are attending. Mirroring. Each person’s piercing attention frames the other and makes them visible and known. This is a dance of becoming for and through the eyes of the other. This is a dance about undoing one another. The dancers vacillate between moments of total physical merging and long, unbearable separations and absences. Whenever they are separate for an extended period of time Jesse begins to desperately shadowbox or shadowfuck the empty space around him—a yearning gesture for the union of just moments before. His movements remind us that a self cannot exist without an other to coax, know, and name it into an existence. We fight and fuck in order to make each other real. This constant shifting in and out of one another’s domain reminds me of the psychoanalytic notion of rapprochement. It is said that we each must pass through this developmental stage whereby our child-self swings like a terrified pendulum between the experience of total merge and utter abandonment. It is the age-old, internal conflict between feeling too much connection vs. not enough. The stakes of rapprochement are high in that both engulfment and abandonment might result in the ultimate decimation of the burgeoning, young self. Thus rapprochement is one of the most complex of all developmental phases and it sets the stage for our later adult intimacies. Faye and Jesse reveal the ways that our childhood rapprochement remains an eternally unfinished negotiation. Fear of togetherness. Fear of separateness. What are the limits of a self, in a relationship, before it becomes the other? What are the bounds of a You and a Me and what are all the possibilities of an Us?
Cassie Peterson, BOMBlog, April 18, 2012, page 3
Never shying away from theatrical elements or devices, Faye constructs a discursive string of familiar “RELATIONSHIP” representations in a way that makes the piece look like a moving collage of self and other. This collage effect is partly achieved through the abundant use of costumes and props; the dancers spend a great deal of time dressing up and down and changing clothes to and for one another. Each costume is both incomplete and exaggerated; Faye hyperbolizes the objects that we employ in our everyday lives to signify our identities, and, in doing so, she mocks, challenges, and deconstructs the various identities that we often mistake for the totality of the self. There is sports equipment. Circus paraphernalia. Feathers. Wigs. Beards. Bras. Binders. Jock straps. Glasses. Hats. Ear muffs. Socks. Wallets. Purses. Glitter. Lipstick. Paint. Clown noses. Jewelry. Makeup. You’re Me is like a Rorschach Test on speed. What do you see? What do you see now? What about now? The costumes and props are like found art objects that the dancers reanimate with new meaning and purpose. The objects become evidence of the journey we are all on together. They become evidence of our act of relating. Faye posits and plays with these recognizable representations of self and other before pulling them apart to reveal chaotic nonsense. She dissects “the literal” in front of us and turns something we once recognized, something we once identified with, into an incoherent mess—creating a kind of alchemy where something unknown springs from previously known material. Faye’s work goes straight for the social jugular in how what we know for certain about our-selves and the world is crushed into tiny abstractions. It is both violent and cathartic. In this process of destroying the familiar and rebuilding the unfamiliar with the same material, Faye’s work often feels unfiltered or uncensored. Her choreography can make viewers feel uncomfortable or even overexposed, as if we are watching a very private violence. Like guilt-ridden voyeurs, we are watching something that is really “none of our business.” Playwright/director Young Jean Lee (whom Faye often works with) aptly described Faye as a “choreographer of the id.” Within Freud’s early intrapsychic theories of the self, he declared the id the primitive container for all sexual and aggressive impulses. The id is the part of ourselves that we are supposed to privately grapple with and ultimately control on our own. The id is the part of self that we are conditioned to shun and disown. The id is the
Cassie Peterson, BOMBlog, April 18, 2012, page 4 skeleton in the closet and the star of Faye’s work. She is compulsively interested in the things we are not to speak of, or identify with. In You’re Me, Faye and Jesse muck around in the rough-draft aspects of a relationship—the taboo struggles that are too real, too raw, and too ugly to bring into the public domain. Throughout the piece, Faye and Jesse frequently stop whatever they’re doing to check in about the details of what they are trying to depict or role-play. All relationships are, in a sense, a series of role-plays. In one vignette in particular, Faye actually directs Jesse through what she calls, “The perfect romantic moment.” We watch them attempt many different “takes” at staging it. Faye is patient. They are experimenting and trying to get it right. They miss the mark several times before nailing down the ideal and perfect representation of a romantic moment. We are happy and sated in their success because now, in this moment, they are known to each other and to us as a romantic couple. These frequent “check-ins” externalize aspects of their process and reveal that relationships are always performed and thus have no intrinsic or true “nature.” This self-referential, meta-vignette also reveals the dynamics of a formalized director/performer relationship. This is a commentary on the actual real-time roles of The Maker and The Made. Within the piece, Faye continues to ask what it means to be a director. She names and questions her own designated role inside of the performance and points to the difficulty of trying to manifest one’s own creative vision through the body of an other. But after an hour of overtly directing Jesse through unyielding moments of love and war, he viciously attacks her and Faye collapses in defeat. This is the first moment of capitulation in the piece. The director is defeated and defamed. It is painful to watch this kind of mutiny and loss of power. Jesse watches her moan in pain from the corner. He has undone her. Can the piece continue? Jesse is a good boy and he knows his role(s). He dutifully nurses Faye back to health, back to her feet. He is putting his director back together again for the grand finale. To end this epic journey, Faye climbs up, elevated once more, on top of a platform covered in a dense array of technicolored costumes. Jesse hands Faye each item and she puts them on her body before quickly removing them—all the previously conjured images from the entire piece are present now in this closing sequence. Faye has survived (and beaten) the demands made upon her by her own work. She is triumphant. She is cracking a whip with no regard for where it lands and Jesse has slowly slinked away to a safe corner on the stage. He has left her, but watches from afar. She needs us now. She turns her attention to the audience and confronts us with a bold, unwavering posture. She locks eyes with us. It’s an invitation. No, it’s a demand. What is next? Who is next? “I only know about the work after it’s done,” Faye says to me, earnestly, after the run. Yes. Me too. Did I get it right?
Word Play
Choreographers who combine dance and text discuss their unique set of dilemmas. Faye Driscoll interviewed by Cynthia Hedstrom, Dance Magazine, April 2013 I’m interested in the psychology of movement—how we make meaning out of movement, and how the act of viewing changes that meaning. Usually I develop text and movement together in my dances. I’ll encourage my dancers to include their voices when we’re investigating an idea or image through improvisation. We often do writing exercises before or after a movement exercise. Sometimes these are just free writes; sometimes they’re more generative for text material. In There is so much mad in me (2010), we were doing explorations around identity and the ways we’re perceived by other people. We wrote lists of negative attributes, all the worst things about ourselves and other people. These are used in a monologue, where one of the dancers freaks out and screams at her two partners in the middle of a kind of bad jazz routine. Ultimately it turns into a self-hating tirade. The audience becomes culpable because some of the things being said are probably thoughts they have already had. In another piece, 837 Venice Boulevard (2008), three performers manipulated each other like puppets. The “puppeteer” would project all his most ideal thoughts, as well as the parts of him that he wanted to express but couldn’t, onto the “puppet” performer. The piece poked fun at how we are all constantly telegraphing who we are based on how we think others perceive us. I often use text to seduce the viewer so they might think, “I know what is happening and who those people are.” Then I flip things on their head so that the viewer is left in the uncomfortable attempt to re-locate him- or herself. My intention is to open a space where there is uncertainty and ambiguity, where falsehoods and truths mix. I think some of these practices come from feeling frustrated by dance as a silent art form. Dancers spend years in studios silently practicing. You are taught to ask questions only if you absolutely need to. As a kid when I made shows around the house, there was this irreverent sense that you could grab whatever you needed to express yourself—text, props, video. My work comes from that kind of impulse. My performers are dancers first. They have technical depth and can improvise and generate material—and they have to be comfortable talking and sometimes singing. I am transformed by the process and so are they. I’m interested in the whole human being and the dancers’ complete empowerment in the work. In my new work, I’m forcing the ritual of storytelling to the forefront inside a physically driven work. It will be an epic fiction that’s danced, sung, and spoken. Upcoming performances: March 21–23, You’re Me at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH; May 3–5, Mariana, new work on the Zenon Dance Company in Minneapolis; June 24–26, You’re Me at American Dance Festival, Durham, NC; and at The Yard, Martha’s Vineyard, MA, in July.
You’re Me review: Faye Driscoll’s tour de force Allan Ulrich, SFGate, March 8, 2013 Faye Driscoll’s “You’re Me” is an emotional roller-coaster ride of extraordinary, almost terrifying intensity, a tour de force of exposed nerve endings and risky physicality. The heat was almost palpable Thursday evening at CounterPulse, where the five-part, 80-minute duet, completed last year, received its local premiere. Brooklyn-based Driscoll and her collaborator Jesse Zaritt propose a relationship so fiercely projected you’re occasionally afraid you’ll get bitten by one of the performers. But the choreographer also seems a canny master of theater, as she plots this affair from its deceptively placid beginning through a range of encounters to its unhinged, even manic finale. It’s hard to know what to make of the beginning of “You’re Me.” You enter, are offered pieces of fruit by attendants and there, framed by a blinding white set, stand Driscoll and Zaritt, motionless, dressed in fabric and bling they might have salvaged from their grandmothers’ closets. They change into casual garb, stretch a tape to demarcate the dancing space (yes, think boxing ring) and, in silence, deliver a series of unison arm gestures, leaning bodies and gentle pliés. Before long, rivalries emerge, biceps are flexed. What comes through is the astonishing trust the pair place in each other; at one point, Driscoll, holding Zaritt’s finger, lowers herself into a split. He courts her with a rose drawn from a box. She rejects it. They go at each other’s clothes. He decorates her extended arm with jewels. She collects the gems, only to spit them out. He is the more introspective of the two. She is frequently staring at the audience, as if to gain approval, very much a drama queen. “L’amour fou” reigns in the next section, as Driscoll and Zaritt dust and spray each other with brightly hued pigments. As legs interlock, and lifts proliferate, he manages to plant a kiss on her lips. This doesn’t so much relieve the tension as sustain it. They do things you understand only if you’re in a relationship. Each stuffs oranges down the other’s pants. So when Zaritt in a tranquil moment cuts an orange for Driscoll, the gesture reverberates. The final section, with its start-and-stop rhythm, suggests a flip book of a volatile liaison. But then it turns frantic as the duo go about trashing their environment. The sequence looks messy; it’s supposed to, but somehow, the emotional focus has been blurred. Until then, “You’re Me” holds you tight in its grip.
Dance ponders duality in Faye Driscoll’s You’re Me Emmaly Wiederholt, The SF Examiner, February 28, 2013 A woman stands onstage, holding a man’s hand. She grabs what looks like yellow paint and smears it on his shoulders and arm before continuing up her own arm and shoulders. They begin to dance. Then she grabs a fistful of gray and black feathers, and proceeds to follow the yellow smear until the mess is spread along both of them. This is a glimpse into New York-based choreographer Faye Driscoll’s “You’re Me,” onstage at CounterPulse in The City starting Thursday. The evening-length dance-theater piece, a duet between Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt, examines how people constantly are made, and undone, by one another. Driscoll and Zaritt started making “You’re Me” by exploring beauty. “What is beauty to me? How do we expose what is grotesque and awkward?” Driscoll says. “The work developed out of Jesse and I being in a room investigating this train of thought. Out of that came desire, sex, gender, image, etc. What is the idea vs. the reality? What is the image vs. the experience?” “I identify as a woman. Jesse identifies as a man. When you look at the two of us onstage, what will people see? In many ways we’re not able to escape what people see. There’s an interdependency between self and others, who you are and who you become around other people.” Driscoll, who has choreographed four previous evening-length pieces, says “You’re Me” is different because she cast herself in it. “For me, it was really an experiment. When I first started choreographing, I made a conscious decision not to be in my own work,” she says. “When I finally decided to enter the work it was tortuous. I had to constantly ask myself: What do I feel is the right choice to make on the inside vs. what does it look like from the outside? It was really challenging, but ultimately has been one of the best performance experiences of my life. I’m not controlling this anymore; I had to let go.” Using costumes, feathers, paint, marbles, jewels, fruit and other zany props, Driscoll and Zaritt — with humor and poignancy — tackle multiple dualisms: male vs. female, others vs. self, performer vs. choreographer, performer vs. audience, idea vs. reality, image vs. experience. Promotional material for the show promises a “moving portrait of the impossible struggle to unhinge the palindromic loop of self and other.”
Who am I? - Choreographer Faye Driscoll talks You’re Me Rita Felciano, San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 6, 2013 CounterPULSE always makes a point of thanking its volunteers. One can only hope that they’ll turn up en masse to help clean up after Faye Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt step off the stage this coming weekend. Their You’re Me is not exactly what might be called a clean show. Still, if the work-in-progress preview, presented at the end of their residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts almost two years ago, is any indication, the mess is more than worth it. After all, most of us will recognize a mess when we see it. The Los Angeles-born Driscoll lived in San Francisco from 2003 to 2005. She put in a shift at the ODC/Pilot Program — for on-the-verge choreographers — even though dance was not her primary focus at the time. As she explained in a recent phone conversation from her home in Brooklyn, in San Francisco, “I really was inspired by the music and art scene, hanging out with people who were putting band together that were kind of art bands.” At the time, she was in recovery mode from two years of performing and touring with Doug Varone and Dancers. Apparently it had not been all that happy a match — too much structure, too much energy from the top down. So San Francisco — where the mantra is “you can do anything you want,” and where you go “to find yourself ” — proved to be liberating experience for her, particularly because she had been so “serious and disciplined about dance” since her childhood. In some ways Driscoll is still trying to find herself. On the most visible level You’re Me is a piece about a relationship — after all, it is performed by a man and a woman. But it’s also a work looking at identity: the one you claim for yourself, that one you are working toward, or the one that is imposed on you by the outside world. For many people that is unstable territory that tends to slide away from under your feet. Partly because she “had a lot going on in my home that was kind of crazy,” and because she remembered people reflecting an identity back to her that was quite different than the one she experienced herself, Driscoll was drawn to dance early on. “Dance had the structure that allowed me to express what I am in the world,” she says.
Rita Felciano, San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 6, 2013, page 2 “It was the place where I could go and practice my movements and make myself open to other people’s bodies.” You’re Me is inspired by the in-between spaces Driscoll observes in non-verbal human communication, as well as by fixed historic representations she and Zaritt collected in the visual arts, from Renaissance paintings to contemporary magazines. In the process they became fascinated by how ideas of what is masculine and feminine have changed over time. Finding much that resonated but also created dissonance within themselves, the experience fed into their appetites for trying out other identities. To do that choreographically, in one section of the five-part 80-minute duet, the two performers also draw on one of the earliest ways kids try to tell us something about who they are. A little girl who wobbles around in her mother’s heels is considered cute. A little boy who prefers dresses to pants rings alarm bells. Role-playing, fantasy games, make-believe, dress-up —whether in a playgroup or the theater — are serious business. They present way of talking about being or becoming in the world. But they are also a lot of fun. Driscoll describes her working process as taking “things and blowing them up, creating them to excess and putting them into rhythmic structure and try to pull them apart and grapple with them.” Here, in addition, to the physically demanding movement interactions, the dancers have to don, strip off, and exchange parts of props and costumes, often at dizzying speed. They rehearsed a lot, she says, and they have a prop master who makes sure that the final mess is nicely controlled. Pulling You’re Me together, however, was a different challenge. Like many artists, Driscoll is homeless, scurrying around from one studio to another. “I could never rehearse with all that stuff I had to lug around.” That’s why the residency at Headlands became such a respite: they gave her a closet.
Faye Driscoll Performs YOU’RE ME at Abrons Arts Center It’s Okay to Laugh About Nostalgia Kayt MacMaster, Broadway World, January 28, 2013 Faye Driscoll’s 90-minute duet, “You’re Me,” part of American Realness 2013 at Abrons Arts Center Playhouse January 18-20, is simultaneously a shocking and hauntingly relatable work of art. Ms. Driscoll and her duet partner, Aaron Mattocks, never leave the stage. From their first appearance, elevated on boxes and clothed in multiple layers of gaudy clothing, jewelry, wigs, and shawls, to the point that their arms are full of bundles of indiscernible treasures that eventually slip to the floor, they are transparent, like children, both proud and bewildered by the situation in which they have been discovered. “You’re Me,” involves piggy-back rides, feathers, crudely spray painting bodies and clothes, transferring items between dancers by way of mouth, and sprinkling the stage with baby powder, fruit and every imaginable clothing item. It is a ritualistic embodiment of totally unsupervised playtime, and Driscoll is speculating about what would happen if we could still dwell in that space of total abandon. Her supposition is based in a living relationship, a duet, which results in a battle of the sexes so sincere that it seems slightly unintentional. The duet bounces between “scenes,” each delivering a scenario with new, but never specifically labeled, characters: an endearing young couple, graffiti-spraying gangsters, hipsters at the party of the century, patients in an insane asylum, a circus act, large birds, maybe even dinosaurs. Within each scene Driscoll and Mattocks are pitted against one another, always resolving to rely on one other in the end, no matter how silly, precarious or anticlimactic the result may be. Driscoll’s true genius, her pure mastery of form, is perfected like a scientific formula, but she disguises it in layers of wigs, spray paint, feathers, fruit, huge sheets of cardboard, baby powder, several chests worth of dress up clothes and general chaos. Like all great performers she is sly. Slowly and imperceptibly she convinces the audience that, nothing weird is happening because everything is both embarrassingly familiar and methodically presented. This work is also a candid attack on the formality of performance art, and an unexpected invitation to the audience to let their post-modern dance guard down. Driscoll and Mattocks consciously spill everything over the fourth wall. Their obvious expressions, secretly chastising one another with an over-the-shoulder glance into the audience or the always-recognizable non-verbal plea of approval that was shot more than once to the spectators, took
Kayt MacMaster, Broadway World, January 28, 2013, page 2 away any preconceived separation of performer and audience. The dancers smirked and giggled unintentionally, reminding the audience that they, too, are humans. “You’re Me” provides the opportunity to revisit a bizarre, half-resurrected memory and realize that it can stay bizarre and half-resurrected. Let that be the new name for nostalgia, and you can sprinkle baby powder on it, eat some of the fruit being passed around the theater on silver trays and wonder what on earth they could think of next.
Putting the Id in Kid: Faye Driscoll at the ICA Debra Cash, Arts Fuse, November 4, 2012 You’ve heard that art is meant to get you back in touch with your inner preschooler? Faye Driscoll, a New York provocateur/choreographer/director hit the ICA with her two-person show You’re Me last weekend and left the usually pristine Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theatre splattered with spray paint, tinsel, and squashed tomato. I hope the cleanup crew got combat pay. We were led outside (not too cold on the waterfront) to climb the outdoor stairway to the museum’s theatre space. En route we were offered trays of green grapes and dried figs. (This is a welcoming gesture I’d like to see repeated at, say, the Opera House.) Munching on the fructose, we found our seats and watched two disheveled, fabric-swathed figures standing on platforms shed pieces of their costumes like Christmas trees losing needles. Then, responding to some imperceptible cue, they stripped down to grey t-shirts and tights. This, it turned out, would be consequential because much of You’re Me is an extended and explosive game of dress-up. These neutral bases became canvases for the performers’ unrepressed self-expression. Over the next 90 minutes, Driscoll and the remarkable, fluent Aaron Mattocks, who had stepped into a role created by Jesse Zaritt and reportedly learned the role on two-week’s notice, stepped, bounced, shrieked, and scrabbled through a series of 20 to 30-count episodes, much of it having to do with orality. She ate out of the palm of his hand. He whimpered, mouth open, like a baby bird, while she, googly eyed, fed him morsels from her mouth. He spit stones. Whole oranges got stuffed into their costumes to indicate boobs, knobby knees, deformed shoulder joints and—you knew it had to happen—scratchable, hanging balls. There was a Halloween-worthy, faux knife murder where a tangle of red yarn became viscera enjoyed by a glazed-eye zombie. At one point, the duo pounced on a cache of costume-fixings, Driscoll riding the back of Mattock’s neck like a hobbyhorse. Wigs, pink netting, and scarves flew through the air as she flashed through a snapshot-like series of instant characters, a bargain basement Cindy Sherman. When the two performers pulled out spray cans and started painting themselves and each other in day-glow colors, you felt they’ve been waiting for permission to do this their entire adult lives. But what was really interesting—moving—was the moment when Driscoll and Mattock started rolling across
Debra Cash, Arts Fuse, November 4, 2012, page 2 the paint-splattered floor cloth. It bent around them like an envelope, and even when you couldn’t see it, you assumed their anarchic game was going on happily as before. Then, unexpectedly, Driscoll screamed. A real scream. And everything stopped. Mattock walked away, backwards, as if stunned. What pulled the plug? There was no answer, but there might have been a hint in how Driscoll repeated that momma bird tiptoeing with her teeth in a frozen grimace. Mattock offered her an orange. She moved her face towards it, listless. He bit through the rind and offered her the open segment. She ate. Slowly, sharing it, they settled into the posture of human beings again, albeit human beings covered with the messy traces of their adventures. You’re Me should have ended there, instead of returning to its lively, baby powder-spraying finale. Maybe Driscoll just meant to underline the self-help book adage that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
DANCE REVIEW: Are you me, am I you? Linh Vuong, The MIT Tech, November 16, 2012
As I entered the theater hall of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, I saw two dancers standing statuesquely on pedestals, dressed in the strangest ensemble of garments and jewelry. As the audience settled down into their seats, they couldn’t help but glue their eyes to the stage, where the dancers slowly let each item drop onto the floor, one by one. And then, in the complete silence of the theater, they rapidly removed all the colorful clothes to uncloak their unadorned bodies, dressed in grey T-shirts and tights. The performance started with playful interactions between the two dancers, Faye Driscoll and her partner Aaron Mattocks, many of which drew laughter from the audience. Their movements symbolized the progression of courtship between a man and a woman, highlighting all the scenarios that each of us has possibly experienced in our own lives. For instance, in one particular segment, Mattocks crudely gifted Driscoll with a rose, in the awkward manner of a teenage boy with no idea how to approach his crush; Driscoll in turn tried to teach him how to be a gentleman, how to present a rose to a lady, and how to tenderly hug a woman. Occasionally a chime sounded, apparently representing every turning point in the evolution of relationship, when emotions intensify and feelings deepen. Romance then quickly escalated to burning passion, obsession and more primal needs. Sexually provocative movements like pelvic thrusts, hip wiggles and nipple grabs quickly turned up the heat and the steaminess on stage. Even their props, which were oranges, changed from representing shoulder muscles and knee flabs to more overtly sexual body parts. The sexual tension quickly reached its tipping point and the duo entered a crazed and maniacal period where they spray-painted each other in movements full of rawness, chaos and absurdity. At the peak of it all, Driscoll climbed onto Mattocks’s shoulders and went through a remarkable and extremely rapid change of characters and costumes. As Aaron pulled out a variety of scarves, shirts, wigs and dresses from the drawers of the table on which they were standing, Driscoll tried on everything, transforming herself from a hippie to a Greek woman, to a Middle Eastern man to a Marilyn Monroe-esque blonde in a white dress. Driscoll’s facial expression conveyed a sense of mockery and contempt, with a hint of anger. “Is this who you want me to be? Are all these superficial characters what you want to see in me?” Such a turbulent and volatile relationship is exhausting, and almost naturally, someone had to get hurt. As the duo moved across the floor splashed with paint, Driscoll suddenly screamed, a painful, heartbreaking, lonely scream that touched my very core. She had reached her limit. You’re Me is a raw, down-to-earth and honest representation of the archetypal male-female relationship. Faye’s uninhibited choreography and freedom of movements, combined with her fantastic layering of images into the bodies of the dancers have given us a striking interpretation of the notions of self, fantasy, romance, passion, devastation, and recovery.
Impressions of Faye Driscoll’s “You’re Me” Tara Sheena, The Dance Enthusiast
Faye Driscoll owns me. She owns anyone who has seen her work; anyone who has ever heard of Young Jean Lee; anyone who’s ever stepped foot in New York Live Arts; anyone in the Bay Area; anyone who’s ever said dance should not be funny; probably anyone who’s sported a wig and feather boa in public; and she definitely owns anyone who thought dance was dead. Driscoll reminds us of this in her newest work, You’re Me, which had a twoweek run at the Kitchen April 12-21. In her evening-length duet performed with the equally zany and dynamic Jesse Zaritt, Driscoll sets up a world where anything goes, as long as she gets to call the shots. And, these shots involve everything, from spray paint fights, to marble spitting, to emptying and re-emptying the most extravagant costume drawer you’ve ever seen. Driscoll knows how to make a dance. Her movement is rooted in a post-modern vocabulary and made increasingly more exciting by the dramatic facial expressions that accompany her gestural language. Sexually suggestive movements - pelvic thrusts, inner thigh rubbing, nipple grabs - morph out of provocative seaminess, into the world of slapstick as Driscoll and Zaritt’s facial expressions take the forefront. Eyes repeatedly bug out, lips smack and deadpan expressions are a consistent source of unassuming absurdity. A memorable passage finds Zaritt grasping onto Driscoll’s shoulders from behind, as he hops his right leg up to meet his left. He leads Driscoll in a stilted walk around herself and comes off as a dorky animal, pining after her affection. His role as her submissive suitor continues for most of the work. Hare-brained motifs disappear and resurface, especially in a highly climactic moment when Driscoll, standing center-stage on top of dresser drawers with Zaritt below her, furiously hands him random costume pieces. Mounds of beaded necklaces are followed by faux facial hair, baseball caps and scarves. Velvet capes abound! Again, Driscoll maintains all the control, as she frenetically puts on and takes off each item Zaritt hands her. Zaritt readily obliges. By the end of the evening, we have endured a spray paint battle, a faux knife fight, and a feather explosion, yet, in this nutty, surrealist world, there is still room for more of Driscoll. We hope Faye Driscoll’s adventurous acts of Dance Theater will continue to bowl over the arts community for a long time to come. She does own us after all.
Testing Realness
Deborah Jowitt, DanceBeat (artsJournalblogs), April 26, 2012
You’re Me. That’s the name of Faye Driscoll’s duet for herself and Jesse Zaritt. And the chosen title is a pretty blunt way of putting out an idea that longtime couples acknowledge in more honeyed syntax—possibly with damp eyes. I hope it won’t turn you off, dear reader, if I note that this no-holds barred encounter between a man and a woman is about identity and gender roles. You’re Me tackles these pardon-the-yawn issues with such savagery and convoluted wit that an evening at the Kitchen, where the piece continues through April 21, is a bracing experience. One thing that makes the duet so startling and, at times, moving is that Driscoll and Zaritt (who contributed material to the piece) are not playing with assurance the many roles that mates fall into with each other; they’re trying them on, never sure if this stance or that gesture is the right one, or “the real me.” A smile may begin tentatively, become absurdly broad, then wither. A pumping of the pelvis, stripper-style, may be executed so forcefully and go on for so long that it loses whatever meaning it was supposed to have. Being a man and a woman, Driscoll and Zaritt explore all the stereotypes hanging off me-Tarzan-you-Jane, peel-me-a-grape, and love-me-or-I-die, plus all the other contradictions and variants attached to gender or societal conventions. Zaritt’s lyrical passages can look either lovely or goofy (once a bounding, androgynous Pan, another time a clichéd female). Driscoll, lumbering spraddle-legged, fists clenched, goes over the top in denoting “male,” yet also demonstrates strength without artifice.
Deborah Jowitt, DanceBeat (artsJournalblogs), April 26, 2012, page 2 The opening tableau symbolizes discarding another kind of artifice. When the audience enters the Kitchen’s black-box theater, Driscoll and Zaritt are displayed side by side, facing us. They’re unnaturally tall, since the long velvet panels of their fantastic attire conceal the white stools they stand on. The two are not just costumed; they’re decorated. Beads, flowers, fruit, scarves, what-all. A hank of fake hair protrudes from Zaritt’s sleeve, a white plastic bottle is stuck in Driscoll’s. They stand motionless for a long time. Beneath her straggly bangs, Driscoll looks uncomfortable and truculent; Zaritt, with his curly hair, big eyes, and noble posture, could pass for a Roman emperor having a bad-toga day. Gradually, it becomes apparent that the two are unobtrusively shedding all the stuff hanging off them. It takes a while. Plop, there goes an orange. A necklace falls. A bouquet slips from inert fingers. Finally, they rip off what’s left, pick up the mess, pile it onto the stools, pull the stools apart, draw elastic tapes from them, and anchor the tapes together near the first row of seats to form a V on the floor. In this arena, wearing tight, stretchy pants—half jeans, half-leggings—and tee-shirts with scattered silver studs, they run through a variety of poses, sometimes in unison, sometimes not. Getting into each new position involves a lot of tiny adjustments. Gradually they stop holding the poses and begin morphing smoothly from one to another. A welter of relationships emerge, some of them extreme. The positions are often awkward, askew—attempts at defining something the performers aren’t sure about. Their faces work too—taking on slyness, anger, satisfaction, humility, etc.
Several times, they talk inaudibly to each other. They could be a couple trying to get something straight for themselves or performers working out a maneuver. For instance, Driscoll doesn’t approve of the way that her partner grabs and hugs her. Over his shoulder, her face shows us her discomfort, her need for this to be perfect. She gestures as she talks. He can’t get it right. He brings a rose from one of the stools and offers it. That cuts no ice at first. Then, finally, bliss! Some of their games edge into violence. He pretends to pull out her guts; she writhes unconvincingly. Throughout this first part, Driscoll skillfully manipulates her material, repeating moves, adding to them, performing them with subtly different intent. Some of them look almost everyday, others are stagier, and some
Deborah Jowitt, DanceBeat (artsJournalblogs), April 26, 2012, page 3 are wildly bizarre. Consider this. she stands with one arm stretched out to the side, an expectant look on her face. Zaritt approaches her with bulging cheeks and carefully spits out a row of “diamonds” along her arm and into her hand. Then he collects them again, she kneels, and he attempts to spit them into her open mouth. Hopeless. Finally he passes the remainder to her mouth-to-mouth. She grins and holds up her arms in triumph. This last episode is a transition from the elegantly spare, but meaty part into the second, messier half of You’re Me. Now props make the role-playing more excessive, more maudlin, more desperate, as if aggrandizing everything and dressing it up would make it more real, but in various ways, it becomes less real. For instance, at one point the business end of a falling-apart red string mop becomes the intestines Zaritt yanks out of Driscoll, while she writhes, open-mouthed. The act is more horrible than it was earlier without the prop, but also more vehemently fake. The pair re-arrange the tapes to indicate a square arena and take down and lay out the big white, plastic sheet that has been hanging on the back wall. Along its edges, they place assorted objects that include small dishes of paint and plastic spray bottles. He puts on a fake beard to do this and straps a belt around her. They start out fairly formally. He rotates her as if she were a ballet princess, although her balances are all askew. He spins under her arm like the woman in a ballroom competition. Recalling how he had attempted to spit jewels into her mouth; she now tries to drop grapes into his. With the same results. When Amanda K. Ringger makes sidelights turn the area into a glamorous stage, the two dancers tie up their t-shirts to expose their midriffs, drop their pants, pull down tiny, tight magenta skirts hidden under the shirts, and show off for a few seconds.
Chris Giarmo’s sound score becomes more and more present, perky tunes; men chorusing; raucous noises; heavy, rhythmic thuds; and, toward the end, sweet voices singing distantly of love. Driscoll and Zaritt seek out wilder and wilder effects, jumbling real feelings with simulacra of the same. Oranges stuffed under clothes imitate (poorly) muscular shoulders, testicles, and blobby knees. The two performers can still stand equably side by side, her lifted leg crossed over his. She holds his hand and drags a gob of sticky yellow paint across his chest and outstretched arm, continuing it along her own arm and chest. Oneness, however, doesn’t preclude their stabbing each other viciously with a trick knife. They dance tough, panting and howling, attacking and placating, cranking
Deborah Jowitt, DanceBeat (artsJournalblogs), April 26, 2012, page 4 each other by their arms. Running amok in this playground of the psyche, they dip their toes in paint while on the run and draw lines on each other. Grabbing the white bottles, they spray colors haphazardly on themselves. Clouds of talcum too. They pull up the plastic sheet and crawl under it. What is going on? Or more accurately, why has Driscoll made this part of You’re Me so long and so extreme that you want it to end? Perhaps she’s trying to illustrate the futility of fully understanding who you are and what you want and how another fits into that. Certainly she and Zaritt are getting crazier and more erratic, tireder and sweatier, stained with paint. The ending redeems the marathon of self-decoration and extreme behavior. Driscoll climbs on one of the stools (now placed together downstage in the wrecked arena). Zaritt pulls item after item from inside the other stool— beads, scarves, headdresses, more—and tosses them up to her as quickly he can. She tries most of them on and immediately, almost automatically, discards them. A storm of flying fabric surrounds her. Finally Zaritt retreats to the back of the space and watches her watch us. The music dies away. Driscoll gazes at us searchingly, without pretense—still seeming to ask “what do you think of me?” Or maybe, curiously, “And you, who do you think you are?” I’ve been laughing, half-horrified for a while; now I feel more like crying. After a while, Zaritt begins to clap his hands together softly. The audience laughs, then gets it and starts to applaud. Driscoll smiles. Her own, her real smile of pleasure is beautiful.
Highly recommended, Faye Driscoll @ UCLA arts meme, April 26, 2012
First it’s really good in a crazy way. Then it’s crazy in not that good of a way. Then it ends up being super interesting in a way you can’t quite figure out. That’s a road map for “You’re Me,” a grueling duet that dancer/choreographer Faye Driscoll will present tonight and Friday at the Glorya Kaufman Theater on the UCLA campus. By her side, in her face, and all around her is Jesse Zaritt, her sometimes blithering, sometimes aggressive, mostly femaledominated dance partner. The show is being produced by UCLA dance department vice-chair Victoria Marks at the smart and newish Kaufman Theater on campus [clue: use parking lot #4]. Both in its title and in its ornate roll-out, “You’re Me” concerns the narcissistic projections that underpin our love pairings. It’s a dance-descent into relationship hell. Dragging along for the ride are ids, egos, grimaces, animal shrieks, carnality, brutality, lust and posturing. Also on board: feathers, oranges, grapes, gladiolas, spray paint, sunglasses, scarves and boas, and you, the audience. The final minutes of this extreme performance-pageant contain a very brave and good solo by Driscoll. “You’re Me” brings to mind similarly gutsy artists we’ve recently hosted in L.A.: Miguel Gutierrez at the Alexandria Hotel and Anne Halprin’s “Parades & Changes” at REDCAT.
Faye Driscoll Entices with ‘You’re Me’ at UCLA Laura Bleiberg, The Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2012 Journeying through life is a messy business. Finding one’s authentic place is even messier, if not downright impossible. Life’s disorderliness was both a theatrical device and a philosophical theme for New York-based choreographer Faye Driscoll in her latest dance-theater piece, “You’re Me.” Driscoll, who grew up in Venice, and Jesse Zaritt, her collaborator and fellow performer, were presented Thursday and Friday by UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance. Scarves, wigs, hats, glasses, yarn, spray paint, feathers and fruit – grapes, apples and especially oranges – were defining elements for Driscoll and Zaritt in the 80-minute duet. When the audience entered the Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater, they were stationed already as living statues, elevated on tables and swathed in accouterments. A pedestal is a safe place to be, but very little living happens up there. So down they came, temporarily stripped off the props and began crafting individual identities and their joint relationship. Driscoll thrives on a pendulum of extremes and anarchy. “You’re Me” was laid out in two big sections. The first consisted of bare movements executed in stop-and-start phases, performed in silence. During the freeze-frame poses, the duo stared with neutral faces directly at the audience, as if to say, “Do we look familiar?” In the second part, the pace accelerated and the performers used props to create gender portraits -- and chaos. He fed her diamonds; she dropped grapes in his mouth. He used oranges as shoulder pads; she put them into a pink bra. They spray-painted dividing lines on each other’s bodies. In the final tableaux, Driscoll, by then exhausted and sweaty, was still frantically trying on garments, seeking our approval. The horseplay was over-the-top fun. But it was Driscoll’s awkward and exaggerated dancing style that was original and enticing. With bobbed hair, innocent face and ungainly manner, Driscoll recalled the cute, sitcom sidekick rather than a trained dancer and cutting-edge choreographer. Zaritt, on the other hand, could not mask his buff, virtuoso presence. He withstood and participated in all humiliating treatment with elegant bravura. The work’s final 15 minutes, however, was problematic. Driscoll has a shrieking breakdown, followed by an onstage break, sharing an orange with Zaritt. Whoosh – all that carefully orchestrated momentum was sucked away. The spell was broken for this viewer. It was an unfortunate turn. But at least the striking memories of what happened before still remained.
Stuck On You
Evan Namerow, The Brooklyn Rail, May 3, 2012 Faye Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt can’t move. They shift uncomfortably under the weight of a rainbow of fabric and clothing that hangs messily from their bodies. Standing on tables, they are disheveled giants who stare aloofly around the silent room. They are, in fact, trapped by each other in You’re Me, Driscoll’s newest work, which premiered at the Kitchen last month. This could be either childhood dress-up (although the atmosphere is dense and stiff) or a tragic portrayal of the messy unraveling of two people who inevitably become extensions of one another. Once they manage to shed their layers and clear the space around them, the two performers morph in silence from one situation to the next—some of them silly, and others filled with despair. Zaritt presents a flower to Driscoll and wraps his arm around her, but she stops him. She demonstrates specifically how she wants to be hugged and how he should present the flower, and they try again. Later, Zaritt puts on a macho façade as he tries to lure Driscoll, whose changing facial expressions suggest that she is by turns disgusted and attracted to his shtick. Balancing their own needs with their need for each other seems impossible and rarely genuine. It’s as if they’re both saying, “I need you to love me this way, not that way.” Sexual encounters, played out hilariously with the help of myriad props, sound design by Chris Giarmo, and the performers’ awkward, self-conscious interactions, lead to a messier and more fantastical exploration of their relationship. Covered in spray paint, feathers, and wigs, with oranges occasionally stuffed into their clothing, the two become maniacal, lost, and bewildered. They are literally covered in each other’s messes as they gallop, scream, shove, embrace, and grope. Driscoll, appearing in her own work for the first time in five years, is lovably gawky and ungraceful—fitting qualities for a piece about the chaotic nature of a relationship. Whether conveying humor or agony, she is relentless as she peels back the layers of a self that is shaped by another. Absurdity is everywhere: in her character’s demands, her zany movement, and her desperation. She repeatedly hoists herself onto Zaritt’s back and furiously gallops, taking the reins—literally—of their partnership. Zaritt is a sculptural and fluid dancer, and although there are glimpses of this, You’re Me shows much more of his striking rawness than his virtuosity. He attempts to be Driscoll’s dream man as he showers her with affection, but suddenly he is quivering and filled with rage as his eyes bulge and he points his finger at her. When his macho act seems like it will never end, he unexpectedly segues into a sheepish giggle and applause for Driscoll. Watching such a tumultuous relationship is exhausting, and You’re Me drags on for so long that it becomes irritating and borderline insane. But the lengthiness suggests the futility of the couple’s efforts, regardless of the passing of time. Driscoll collapses to the floor in an agonizing puddle of sobs. And yet, moments later, she pulls herself together and joins Zaritt in the corner to share an orange, looking a bit more cheerful. All better. For now, anyway. Herein lies a sad truth: They cannot detach. Although the stage is a horrifying mess, with pieces of their selves strewn in every direction, they reel in their clothing and hop in circles, once again becoming entangled.
Faye Driscoll, The Kitchen, New York
Coolness gives way to frenzy in this new duet as the young choreographer ponders the rag-tag nature of identity Apollinaire Scherr, The Financial Times, April 16, 2012 Once again, the brilliant young dance-dramatist Faye Driscoll has taken up the vexing question of how to make yourself up – out of what and to what end? The duet You’re Me (at The Kitchen until Saturday, then in Los Angeles) begins with the dancer-choreographer and her equally virtuosic consort Jesse Zaritt on pedestals like heroic statuary, with the contents of a cast-off costume trunk poured over their heads. From this ragtag beginning, they unravel further. In the 90 minutes that the man and the woman wrestle with their quick-change feelings and each other, You’re Me devolves from solid to semi-solid to utter chaos, where it stews for a long time. Off their pedestals and freed from their miscellaneous trappings, the two dancers move between nearly recognisable classical poses. Is Zaritt imitating Michelangelo’s David when he leans into his hip? And when he reclines, is he the Sistine Adam, except with the palm turned up for a cluster of grapes instead of down to reach for God’s finger? The dancers fall in and out of these resemblances with comic abruptness while giving and getting sexual favours. He lavishly licks her hand (taking breaks to gag). She demonstrates how a hug is not a Heimlich manoeuvre, in the hopes of improving his “technique”. You’re Me is at its best in the first half hour, when these comic slippages between the scene before us and what it might stand for abound. According to Driscoll, identity – whether of individuals or a couple – does not arise from the heart, the gut or the head but from the detritus of received ideas, which we patch together until they almost seem original But in the show’s baggy second half, hot frenzy, to music, replaces the cooler tinkering in silence. The performers stuff oranges and other bulbous items in their mouths and down their trousers. They drag a large rectangle of white paper on to the floor and execute an action painting all over themselves and the canvas. Driscoll and Zaritt are consistently interesting performers, giving shape to a vast range of feelings. But to follow them wholeheartedly to the end of You’re Me, I would have had to be back in nappies.
Naturally Awkward Relation
Meredith Benjamin, A Spy in the House of Dance, April 24, 2012 As the audience entered Faye Driscoll‘s “You’re Me,” at The Kitchen on Thursday night, we were greeted by Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt standing atop stools, covered in a hodgepodge of multicolored materials and objects, including an assortment of fruit. Driscoll looked vaguely uncomfortable, while Zaritt stared out at us with a blankly serious expression. Ever so slowly, they began to let things fall to the floor. This static mood finally broke when the pair looked at each other, frantically ripped off their layers until they were both in pants and t-shirts, and descended from their stools. The discomfort that Driscoll displayed as we entered the space would recur throughout the piece. Her wonderfully expressive face reveled in being awkward (an affect that seems particularly contemporary). These expressions went beyond simply reminding us that this was a performance (look, I’m trying to smile!), or of highlighting the unnaturalness of mugging to an audience while dancing (although this was there too). Veering between discomfort, put-on cutesiness, and mock seriousness, her faces were continually in progress, giving the impression of being not quite there yet, or of being tried on for size. They undermined and complicated the dancerly shapes and poses that frequently punctuated phrases of movement. The relationship between the two performers was one of the most touching and realistic I have ever seen in a dance performance. It was a dynamic of mutual respect, even when it veered into annoyance, surprise, boredom, or aggressive tension. Their glances often seemed to say “Are you ready?” in a way that suggested more than a desire for a shared sense of timing. This was a duet in the truest sense of the word. The dynamic between them was at times sexual, angry, exploratory, playful, and combative, but was continually surprising in how true it felt. Despite the clearly skillful dancing, the bizarre assortment of costumes and props, and the intermittent score, at the core of it, I was struck by how well they captured the way people in a relationship (romantic or otherwise) interact: what give-and-take, trying on roles, and attempting to exist in relation to another looks and feels like. In one memorable scene, Zaritt approached and hugged Driscoll. She proceeded to give him notes on this performance of affection in tones inaudible to the audience. Her incredibly natural manner evoked at once a choreographer giving notes to a dancer and a lover making a request of her partner. Zaritt tried again, slightly tweaking his approach and delivery each time, until finally, appearing to be satisfied, Driscoll gazes out over his shoulder at us, with that uncomfortable, gleefully guilty smile. In the second half of the piece, the pair began to set out in a circle a variety of arts and crafts-type supplies, from oranges, to spray paint, to balls of string, and pulled down the nondescript white cardboard sheet that had been hanging at the back of the space. Standing upon their newly floored canvas, Driscoll and Zaritt helped each other try on objects—lipstick, glasses, a bra, oranges down their pants—repeating a similar dance phrase, showing us how these accoutrements did or did not alter the performance. As they moved onto the messier elements available, including paint, powder, and spray paint, they applied them with sexualized moans, tiptoeing back and forth over the line of irony. Driscoll and Zaritt were absolutely captivating performers, their commitment to the piece’s escalating intensity evident in their increasingly sweaty hair, faces, and clothing. In the final scene, Driscoll stood atop
Meredith Benjamin, A Spy in the House of Dance, April 24, 2012, page 2 the two stools, while Zaritt pulled out a seemingly endless assortment of props that evoked a preschool dressup chest: scarves, beads, wigs, hats… Driscoll tried on and discarded these items in an increasingly frenzied ecstasy, until she finally began to lose momentum. She stood before us, clearly exhausted, her ambiguous expression now laced with expectancy. Zaritt, who had faded to the back of the space, began clapping.
Fruits and Loins
Faye Driscoll makes a mess in The Kitchen Quinn Batson, Offoffoff, April 25, 2012 Given as much time as she needs, Faye Driscoll will make the biggest mess she can — and the audience will applaud her for it. With Jesse Zaritt, she has taken a deeply strange, hilarious duet and developed it into something disturbing and ecstatic — and deeply recognizable. You’re Me rides the id to some surprising places and doesn’t give a damn what the superego says. Driscoll and Zaritt like painting in You’re Me, and they are like a painting as we walk in. As two regal statues layered in finery and jewels, they move just enough for us to realize they’re alive, like one of the painted figures on the Rambla in Barcelona. As clothing and accoutrements fall away through attrition and a little extra movement, the absurdity of the dressup reveals itself. Fruit, offered on platters to the audience before and after the show, is plentiful throughout, as if the whole evening is some rich Medieval painting run amok. Taking intelligible notes during this dreamlike performance seems as fruitful as writing while asleep, so only the gist and moments of special drama remain in mind. There is never a moment where we don’t wonder what will happen next, and the moment everything seems to be sheer fun is the moment before a keening, wrenching release of raw pain. There is certainly a progression, or devolution, but no map. Much of the progression feels like a boy/girl romance, from first meeting to total consumption. Things bump along in little bits and starts, victories and defeats. Everything seems both open to experimentation and fairly guarded, initially. As familiarity increases, things shift to more primitive need fulfilment. In the strangest and strongest example of this, he becomes a baby bird with mouth open, she a mommy eagle, both making only guttural sounds to communicate, as she flies across the stage to a backlit bunch of green grapes, glowing like nirvana, and brings them back in her mouth, suddenly incapable of anything but dropping food from her mouth to his, frantic until one hits its target and baby is sated.
Quinn Batson, Offoffoff, April 25, 2012, page 2 Meanwhile, little boundaries of yours and mine, and maybe ours, are staked out with long white straps that come from little white chests of personal effects, the ones the statues stood upon. These and a large white backdrop, which becomes a floor and even a tunnel, are clever set design elements by Sara C. Walsh. Props by Emily Roysdon of paint, fruit, powder and clothes fill out the rest and feed the mess. The messiest, and funniest, scene has each using cans of paint and oranges to play boy (her) or big man (him), and then using the paint to fuel a frenzy of self-decoration and signifiers, trading paint cans and everything else in some elaborately overblown sex fantasy. Just as the hilarity hits its peak, though, something passes her threshold of play and the bottom falls out, into the abyss, and she is a moaning, suffering lump on the ground. The timing and depth of Driscoll’s breakdown rip the throat out of joy for what feel like minutes. Zaritt, and everyone else, retreats as far away as possible and watches carefully, unsure how to proceed. Somehow, slowly, the moment passes and the power of play and fantasy reasserts itself. By the time the chests are pushed together and she is a shape-shifting dervish standing on both, with him feeding her bits of clothing and accessories as fast as he can, we are laughing with her and at her unbridled release, until she scares him to the back wall again where he can only, timidly, applaud her ecstasy.
Faye Driscoll: You’re Me This Week In New York, April 17, 2012
New York-based choreographer Faye Driscoll examines the complicated, ever-changing nature of interpersonal relationships in her latest evening-length work, You’re Me. As the audience enters the space at the Kitchen, Driscoll and dancer Jesse Zaritt are standing still and ridiculously tall at the back of the stage, wearing a bevy of costumes that reference Lewis Carroll’s Red and White Queens as well as Winnie from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, combining humor with absurdity. Pieces of their outfits start to fall off until the performers are reduced to their basic selves and begin exploring each other through a series of awkward movements as if on a first date, feeling out the possibilities as they touch, squirm, hug, eat, and experiment with their bodies, learning about themselves and their partner. This first section, which is performed with little or no background music and evokes silent films at times, goes on slightly too long but eventually morphs into a middle piece in which the duo goes crazy with spray paint before ending with an exhilarating display of props and costumes (courtesy of Emily Roysdon) changing at a furious pace. You’re Me, part of which was presented as not…not (part 1) at last June’s Gotham Dance Festival at the Joyce, is another strong, intricately conceived work from Driscoll (There is so much mad in me, 837 Venice Blvd), a talented choreographer who is not afraid to take chances and challenge both her audience and her dancers. Here she delves into the very essence of art and creativity as she and Zaritt keep going for ninety breathless minutes that allow plenty of room for improvisation, so you never can guess quite what is going to happen next.
Interview | Faye Driscoll The Brooklyn-based choreographer on roles as costumes, and on bringing methods and questions back from her work in theater Zachary Whittenburg, Time Out Chicago, August 9, 2011
Local dancegoers may recognize NYC choreographer Faye Driscoll’s name from two works of hers in repertoire at Same Planet Different World: Cold Blooded Old Times and Hearts on Fire. Her name may also ring a bell with theatergoers who caught Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company in The Shipment last spring at MCA Stage: Driscoll, 35, choreographed an unforgettable, tone-setting sequence referencing minstrel shows for the controversial play. In 2009, I had the great fortune of catching Taylor Mac’s five-hour theatrical extravaganza, The Lily’s Revenge, at HERE in New York City, for which Driscoll made a third-act “dream ballet” of sorts, performed by dancer doppelgängers of some of its central characters. On Wednesday 24, Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt perform excerpts from a duet from not…not at the 2011 Chicago Dancing Festival, part of an homage to long-running variety night Martha @ Mother, hosted by Richard Move in the guise of Martha Graham. I caught up with Driscoll by phone from her Brooklyn apartment. What was the genesis of not…not? What seeded it? The very, very original idea in it was exploring ideas around beauty, which was this really broad, really Faye, big, big thing, that I was interested in: what beauty is to me. My original question was, What does it mean? How
Zachary Whittenburg, Time Out Chicago, August 9, 2011, page 2 does beauty function in my life? But then it quickly went into these ideas of desire, and around the performance of gender. I think that that just had to do with [Zaritt and me] being a man and a woman, you know? From there, we got really into forcing a lot of material from creation myths that we were looking into, like, these ideas around “original man” and “original woman,” and since then…we’re playing a lot with trying to both satisfy and debunk expectations that you might have around a man and a woman on the stage. It’s actually the first section of what will be an evening-length duet. Right now, I’m imagining that we’ll have three sections, and that it’ll premiere in its entirety in April at the Kitchen. This section’s subtitle is, If you pretend you are drowning I’ll pretend I am saving you. That’s a very Miranda July kind of title. Yeah, it kind of is. [Laughs] It’s from this children’s book that my girlfriend gave me. What’s the book? I’ll have to look for it.… I Like You, by Sandol Stoddard Warburg. I switched around the quote. The book actually says, “If I pretend I am drowning you pretend you are saving me.” And not…not? Where did that title come from? It’s this description of the impossible, of something that cannot be described. I think that a theme in my work is this problem of being someone in the world, the constant question of, Am I doing it right? And, particularly because [Zaritt and I] talked about roles in relationships, Am I performing myself right? Am I performing my gender right? Am I performing, you know, my love for you right? All of that and, also, imagining, How else can human beings be? How could we become third things? A gender that we’ve never imagined, that we’ve never heard of? A third kind of creature that’s more than human? Those are some of the questions that are coming up in this [process. People] always describe ourselves in reference to relationship, in relation to each other, like, I’m a man because you’re a woman, that kind of thing. So, What is the “not-not”? Starting that conversation. How has working in theater influenced your choreography? I’ve definitely been affected by theater artists like Young Jean [Lee]. We’ve worked on four different projects together, and I’ve learned a lot. Each time I’ve worked with a theater artist, especially within the context of a play, or, like in The Lily’s Revenge, when I had to work from a script, which I’d never done before, I’m faced with a different palette. It’s outside of what I would, given my aesthetic proclivities, given my background, given whatever I’m struggling with—it forces me to step outside of those things. It’s changed my ideas of what I can do, when I go back to my own work. What have you brought back? The process of research, specifically for The Shipment. I did a lot of research about minstrel shows, watched documentaries and videos, the Nicholas Brothers.… I felt like it was a subject that I really had to immerse myself in, like for Cynthia Hopkins’s show [The Truth: A Tragedy, where] she was dealing with her father’s demise from Parkinson’s disease. And just being around directors and the language they use to get what they need from an actor, or to explore different ideas… I’ve been doing this for a few years now, working on theater projects and on my own stuff simultaneously. You’re always picking up new tools as you go, as an artist. I may not even be fully cognating, I’m just applying, rapidly. Have you borrowed any questions that you’ve heard theater directors use? How do I work with what’s already there? Use every person and their vast potential and their own person-ness? Question-asking, and ways of framing things, so that it doesn’t tear someone down to hear [feedback]. So that it actually opens them up. How would someone imitate you in rehearsal? This one Halloween, my girlfriend and I didn’t have any costumes, so we went to a party as each other. She’s a
Zachary Whittenburg, Time Out Chicago, August 9, 2011, page 3 lawyer, and so I wore a suit and I said, “I object!” all night and random legalese. She wore jazz shoes and a unitard, which I never wear, and she said, “Okay, come here! Tell me your deepest, darkest memory! Okay—now dance it!” [Laughs] Which is not at all what I do, although I am pulling and coaxing and prodding, in a holistic way, I hope, from the human beings in the room. How do you reconcile character-driven work with some of the more conventional, you might say, dance vocabularies that you use? [Each role] is completely interdependent with that person [who originated it]. Part of what I think about with a new project is that I choose, very particularly, who I’m drawn to. Because the work is really dynamic in that way, like in 837 Venice Blvd. and There is so much mad in me, my most recent larger works, people were alternately playing people who weren’t them, and doing and saying things that very much were connected to their [own] experiences. There was a part [in so much mad in me] where one of the characters basically flips out on the other two and says every horrible thing about them that you could imagine, which came from some writings that we did about the horrible things that we think about ourselves. It was really intense to go through that process with [the dancers], and to have enough trust to say all of those things, and then also to be able to recognize that [the scene has] become a third thing. That it’s personal, but it’s not. It’s also a container. But you’ve also restaged works and transferred roles to other dancers. I had to tour both [so much mad in me and 837 Venice Blvd.] and, for 837, I had to replace the lead dancer in [that work], and also in There is so much mad in me. A very important dancer. I panicked. I thought, I can’t do this without these people. It was so much about them. My connection to the work was so much through these people. It took a process, but it was interesting to see that the container of the work did hold. [The work] wasn’t the same [afterward], but what we had built from this intense, layered, psychological process, coming from very personal places, created a character that another person, the right person, could fit into. The work was still as strong as it was with the original cast member. So that was a relief to me, not to think, This person is moving to Europe, so I’ll never be able to present this dance again. Do you have any connections to Chicago? My mom’s from Chicago and so she’s excited. So have you spent a lot of time here, then? Not a lot of time. My cousins were there and we’d visit. I had my first real experience with winter there. I grew up in Los Angeles, so I remember getting out of the cab, going from the cab to the restaurant, and barely being able to make it. Faye Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt perform on Monday 22 and Wednesday 24 as part of the 2011 Chicago Dancing Festival. On Tuesday 23, Driscoll teaches a master class at Visceral Dance Center.
Taking on the Risks of a Mixed Lineup Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, June 7, 2011
“...Ms. Driscoll is fascinating in that she makes such utterly original work. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before, nor can you imagine thinking it up. What are these people doing, what do they mean as they enact little routines, morphing between genders and emotions — at one moment wistful, another furious, faking sexual ecstasy or pumping fists in macho delirium? Both dancers overplayed the air of droll innocence, milking the audience for laughs, but there is a rigor to Ms. Driscoll’s work that underpins its chaotic appearance. By the end you’ve fallen under its spell, laughing helplessly as she sits on Mr. Zarritt’s shoulders, donning wigs, beards, scarves and eyepieces, transforming herself with manic glee into sheiks, maidens, nuns, terrorists, nymphets and brides. Ms. Driscoll looks like she could eat up and spit out the world, and you want to be watching as she does.” The Gotham Dance Festival continues through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 242-0800; joyce.org.
Faye Driscoll: Work in Progress Showing Kate Mattingly, Art Practical, November 2011
Faye Driscoll is a fearless choreographer: young, smart, and intensely creative. In an October 29, 2011, performance with Jesse Zaritt at CounterPULSE, Driscoll presented parts of an unfinished duet called Not... Not, which has been commissioned by the Kitchen and is set to premiere in April 2012. Conflicting selves—and conflicting desires—instigate, inhabit, and complicate the interactions of the dancers. Driscoll’s work perfectly blends somatic and conceptual explorations, and inspires the questions: For whom do we perform? And are we ever not performing? Driscoll’s work calls to mind Richard Schechner’s famous description of multiple selves coexisting in an unresolved dialectical tension.1 Different states of being transform the performers’ bodies; torsos, limbs, and faces appear pulled by needs and wants. Their interactions range from playful to distant to aggressive. Driscoll, in one of the more animalistic and jarring scenes, grunts at Zaritt with a bundle of rope stuffed in her mouth. Other times she is grace personified, executing a phrase of low arabesques like a skater gliding on ice. Zaritt elicits laughter when he poses like a bodybuilder; his muscles are as chiseled as a statue of Adonis. When their bodies intertwine, Driscoll glances at the audience over her shoulder, as if checking on us. For the duration of Not... Not, roles, identities, and feelings continually emerge and liquefy: causal relationships between action and reaction, doing and watching trigger thoughts about display and reciprocity, expectations and posturing, posing and craving. After forty minutes of material, Driscoll joined CounterPULSE director Jessica Robinson Love on stage. The ensuing conversation revealed how alongside a diversity of approaches to dance by artists today, there are varying degrees of engagement offered to audiences. Even though post-performance discussions have become a common technique for generating feedback, their efficacy varies depending on context
Kate Mattingly, Art Practical, November 2011, page 2 and structure. Shannon Jackson writes about the “conversational stall” that can occur in these settings, describing them as “misfires where the ever-sought hope for artist-scholar exchange is ever deferred.”2 Talks can disintegrate into awkward exchanges of words that dampen an experience that was originally intimate and visceral; attempts to resolve conflicting points of view or explain intent can end up muddling the impact of images and ideas. But CounterPULSE transforms such moments of frustration into illumination by flipping the post-performance structure: instead of encouraging the audience to probe the artist’s process, the artist presents questions and solicits feedback from the audience. After the showing of Not... Not, Driscoll’s questions for the audience included, “What story did you tell yourself about what was happening on stage?” Surprisingly, the theater remained full during this discussion section, and audience members were not only invested in Driscoll’s process but also responding to comments from one another. People spoke about ways the duet disrupted, challenged, and exposed ideas about masculinity and femininity. Others talked about the vulnerability of intimacy, the dissolving of emotions, the resurfacing of primordial instincts, and the possibility for a “beautiful ugly.” Driscoll added that this work began with a desire to explore her own ideas about beauty. When the hourlong formal discussion ended, audience members lingered to talk in small groups. This type of post-performance discussion may not successfully happen often, but perhaps it may not need to. Some performances are presented as completed projects, and post-performance talks elucidate paths that have served to bring an artist’s work to fruition. What Driscoll offered, both in her choreographic material and the exchange that followed, was a chance to see performance as an integral part of interaction and conversation. Dialogue emerged among strangers, propositions were presented and developed, people engaged with one another to share and discuss points of view. Even if it makes sense for structures that support artists to evolve as the artists’ works develop, it’s rare to find organizations as adaptable, flexible, and open to change as the artists themselves. ________ NOTES: 1. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 6. 2. Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 111.
The Week Ahead, March 28-April 3 Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, March 25, 2010
Perhaps you’ve never heard of the choreographer Faye Driscoll. But if you’re reasonably plugged into the contemporary arts scene in New York, chances are you’ve seen some of her work. Ms. Driscoll has collaborated with a range of engrossing theater artists, including Young Jean Lee, the National Theater of the United States of America and Taylor Mac. “Loneliness,” her video flip-book dance, was part of the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” triennial. She was a member of Doug Varone and Dancers, has performed with Yasmeen Godder and served as the choreographic assistant to David Neumann, when he created a duet for himself and Mikhail Baryshnikov. And we haven’t even gotten to her independent work yet. Her “837 Venice Blvd.” was named one of the top five dance shows of 2008 by The New York Times, she has residencies galore and even a commission from the American Dance Festival, which barely seems to recognize that there is such a thing as dance in the 21st century. On Wednesday Ms. Driscoll’s “There is so much mad in me” opens at Dance Theater Workshop. The piece, which includes fine dancers like Tony Orrico and Lindsay Clark, is drawn in part from media images of people in extreme states and investigates their enduring need to be seen. What better time to catch a glimpse of Ms. Driscoll? Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m., 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 924-0077, dancetheaterworkshop. org; $15.
“When part of Ms. Driscoll’s ‘837 Venice Boulevard’ was shown at Dance New Amsterdam in 2008, you could feel a collective straightening of backs in chairs among the audience. It’s not often you see an artist who makes you wonder what exactly you are looking at — never mind what on earth she might do next — but Ms. Driscoll is one. There is no knowing whether Ms. Driscoll’s new ‘There is so much mad in me’ will offer the same thrill of seeing movement as meaning, theatricality as life, but there is no doubt that you should take the chance.” - Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times
Faye Driscoll
In 2008 the choreographer Faye Driscoll’s 837 Venice Boulevard was hailed as one of the top five dances of the year by the New York Times, and in 2009, her video Loneliness was featured in “Younger than Jesus,” the first edition of the New Museum triennial. Her latest dance piece, There is so much mad in me, has its world premiere through April 3 at Dance Theater Workshop in New York. THERE IS SO MUCH MAD IN ME grew out of a commission last summer for American Dance Festival at Duke University. My starting point was the idea of ecstatic physical states, which then led me to consider extreme states of consciousness. What happens to human beings when they are in extreme suffering or extreme bliss? I had nine people to work with at the festival, so I began to think not just on the individual level but also in the context of a group or a mob. I researched images from the past fifty years at the university’s library. I brought images of ecstatic states into rehearsals and we began to make tableaus from them, but that got boring pretty quickly. We began to animate the images, and it became for me an examination of the processes of viewing: It wasn’t about interiority, but about what it means to view. I considered what it means to live in a time when we are constantly able to see one another. What makes a particular image salient? How do these technologies of viewing become modes of entertainment? I had this large, interesting international cast that also contributed to the process.
It was very different, because my last piece, 837 Venice Boulevard, was so personal. Venice was a direct emotional narrative about my childhood, and I had a craving to look outward rather than inward. To limit the research, I began to look at images from places that the cast members were actually from. I then made a list of particular kinds of ritual events—funerals, weddings, torture, etc.—and I just followed a trail. There’s that iconic image by Nick Ut, for instance, of the Vietnamese woman, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who was just hit with napalm. I saw this video of her from decades later. She had become a Christian and forgiven the man who had apparently organized the bomb strike. These extreme states just begin to bleed and morph into one another. Given the availability of images, just when you think you are in one state you are suddenly in another. Sometimes the choreography is literal and sometimes it’s abstract. People get sexual. People get drunk or violent. The “literalness” is an interesting problem, because it is also performance. How real are we? How authentic can we be? I play a lot with things that are chaotic which then fall into order; even things that are really messy are rigorously choreographed. It didn’t work to leave sections of the dance unchoreographed, because the initial rawness of an improvisation wouldn’t translate the second time. We had to shape it. In Venice there’s a solo by the dancer Nikki Zialcita (who is also in the current piece) where she is kind of morphing identity. I wanted to do that solo on a macro level. There is a similar sense of rhythmic shift inside There is so much mad in me. The text was partially developed through improvisation with performers, and partially sourced from videos and YouTube. There is one morphing talk-show section that we developed directly from clips of Tyra Banks and Jerry Springer. We spent a week doing exact characters from those shows; it was a way to examine the exploitation and strange healing that takes place there. The last conversation in the piece involves a couple having a fight. We developed the language for it from an improvisation in which I asked the performers to write down what they are most scared of as well as what they hate. We then recited the lines to one another as though it were a conversation between a couple: Like, “I hate that you are going to abandon me.” Or, “I hate that you are going to come into my window at night and hold me at gunpoint.” The body is a dangerous thing. It is impermanent and exciting and vulnerable. I love that—the liveness of it. I love pushing the limits of our physicality, seeing what happens to other human beings when they watch other bodies going though that. It’s very powerful. I don’t know why, but a lot of dance tries to escape the idea of the body. A lot of dance becomes asexual and . . . I guess about some idea of transcendence. -As told to David Velasco
Spring Guide: Choreographer Faye Driscoll Turns Dance Theater Workshop into a Mad House Brian Seibert, The Village Voice, March 24, 2010 Faye Driscoll’s 2008 dance-theater production 837 Venice Blvd. began with Will Oldham’s song “I Am a Cinematographer.” Quickly, though, Oldham’s lyrics gave way to Driscoll’s, which pushed the songwriter’s flickeringly obscure melancholy into a zone more extreme, absurd, and wound-baring. At one point, Driscoll’s narrator sang about a secret—a disgusting, nasty secret that she ate and threw up, and when she looked into the puke and saw herself, “There was truth.” This is self-descriptive of Driscoll’s approach to art-making. Fixating on the gross—or at least on the disconcerting—she holds her audience’s face in it. She believes it is truth. The audience tends to laugh, which is one measure of accuracy. Despite a single case of simulated defecation, Driscoll’s effluvia have been mostly metaphorical and emotional—insecurity, awkwardness, unseemly needs and desires. People laugh to keep from cringing. At the beginning of her choreographic career, that response bothered Driscoll; she was serious. But it didn’t take her long to embrace the comedy. It has helped gain her a steadily growing following, and it’s part of what has caused critics to mark the 34-year-old choreographer as a rising talent. That talent goes beyond uncomfortable humor. What was most impressive about 837 Venice Blvd. wasn’t its guiding conceit—staging childhood identity formation as a clubhouse session of make-believe—or its unabashed exposure of seething emotion. It was its success in expressing the emotion through the conceit. The nasty or tender way the kids treated each other as ventriloquist’s dummies. How a girl’s excoriation of her friends morphed into a confession of her worst fears about herself. The point wasn’t especially subtle, but the transitions could be. If the message wasn’t original, some of the manner was. The originality wasn’t in the movement, per se. Rather than dancing in the traditional sense, the people in Driscoll’s shows act out. The bits that look like “choreography” have quotes around them, suggesting aerobics or drill-team routines kept amateur the better to convey character. Driscoll is a dramatist.
Brian Seibert, The Village Voice, March 24, 2010, page 2 Her new work, There is so much mad in me, plays March 31 through April 3 at the Dance Theater Workshop, her largest venue to date. Where 837 Venice Blvd. was an intimate trio, Mad in me triples those numbers, taking the first piece’s mode of one person trying on successive identities and multiplying it into a labile mob mentality. It shouldn’t be surprising that Driscoll is captivated by extreme states—religious ecstasy, sexual ecstasy, the ecstasy of violence. She’s interested in the similarities between them, and how easily one might become another. These shifts she stages adroitly, cross-fading so that a sports victory becomes an orgy becomes a riot becomes a revival. Getting Busy is not so different from Getting Happy. Sex can turn into violence and back. The group makes these transitions together, though, as in 837 Venice Blvd., there are moments when someone goes too far and ends up the odd man out, exposing the boundaries no one knew were there by exceeding them or by missing the communal cue to stop. In person, Driscoll is soft-spoken and thoughtful. You would not think there was so much mad in her. “I’ve felt in my own life,” she says, “how quick shifts are now required of human beings. We have to manage that speed. Why? I don’t feel like I know. I don’t have a pure moral stance. I’m living in the question and asking people to live in the question.” The other question that Mad in me poses is, in her words, “What is our compulsion to watch each other in extremity?” Driscoll has reality and entertainment and voyeurism on her mind, too. These interests occasion segments of the piece in talk-show format, which, in late February rehearsals, were far less convincing than the nonverbal sections. (The effect of young performers acting younger, so appropriate for 837 Venice Blvd., here threatens to turn into a college improv exercise.) Driscoll’s impulse, it seems, is always to push too far, to linger too long. “What is it like,” she asks and keeps asking, “to sit with something longer than you’re comfortable?” Viewers of Mad in me will be living in that question, laughing uncomfortably, but they will likely also feel the signs of a genuine talent trying to stretch. The dance starts with a scream and ends with a whisper. ‘There is so much mad in me,’ March 31 to April 3, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, dtw.org
Faye Driscoll Mary Love Hodges, Dance Magazine, April 2010 There is so much mad in me opens on a void. The stage is empty and pitch black, though with the house lights on, the fringe of gray marley at the front of the stage is visible. It’s as though the audience is peering over the edge of a cliff. The vignettes that unfold in this space—funny, frightening, and familiar—seem invoked by a magic mirror that, as in fairy tales, distorts the truth so that it can be seen more clearly. That illusion of magic comes from the talents of choreographer Faye Driscoll, her exceptional cast of nine dancers, and Amanda K. Ringger’s simple but potent lighting design. Exploring extreme states and voyeuristic urges in a shifting brew of dance and theater, everything bleeds together in this evening: rage and ecstasy, competitive fire and total surrender, stealing the spotlight and pushing it onto someone else. Michael Helland bounces a spread-legged, upside-down Nikki Zialcita over his groin, then around his body. She bobbles, passive then demanding, humping then giggling, until she succumbs to rapture, which in turn induces a proud body-slapping dance solo. The group gathers around her to cheer her on. The whole sequence occurs over just a few minutes. The entire work is as dense as that passage: slippery but precise, with each moment welded masterfully to the last. Later in the performance, Adaku Utah channels fierce game show hosts, berating her contestants, then rallying them together. The moment dissolves into a Frankenstein of exploitative television when Zialcita is introduced as a victim of great atrocities (war, poverty), but worst of all, her husband has cheated on her with another man! Her glorified savior Utah announces she has just won a new car—and the entire cast goes wild. Unlike some dance theater hybrids, Driscoll’s work relies heavily on the movement itself to communicate. She uses text with some restraint—and to considerable effect—but this is a body show and her movers deliver with lush, articulate performances that say in dance what cannot be expressed in words. Another of Driscoll’s talents is her skill for transitions. Scenes change into other scenes in a way that feels more significant than the scenes themselves. In a desperate attempt to keep the overstimulation going, performers switch
Mary Love Hodges, Dance Magazine, April 2010, page 2 gears from violence to sex to vanity to voyeurism. Everything is an aggressive action, and when momentum lulls, chinks of panic show through what might otherwise be mere boredom. Dancers look at each other as if suddenly naked. Their addiction to zest, made deliberately transparent in the moments-between, reminds us that our cultural obsession with invasive TV and Twitter outbursts is akin to the snake eating its own tail, the cycle feeding itself.
Faye Driscoll, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Apollinaire Scherr, Financial Times, April 5, 2010
You probably haven’t heard of Faye Driscoll, but if experimental dance theatre ever emerges from oblivion, you will. Since the birth of the Greek chorus and the Dionysian rite, dance has been linked with ecstatic states. The 34-year-old LA transplant unites them again, but not for the usual reason of delivering a sexy number. Instead, her giddily gruesome comedy There is so much mad in me reveals what communal forms of extreme feeling leave in the dust – mauled and pummelled – as they ruthlessly pursue their ends. Amanda Ringger’s lighting veers from glowing puddles in the dark to blinding brightness. Brandon Wolcott’s soundscape slips from thundery rumbles to hollow New Wave beats to silence. Meanwhile, a ménage à trois re-forms as a twosome plus taskmaster, or the anarchic play of all nine dancers turns vicious and mob-like before it mutates into an oddly askew aerobics routine. Sometimes an impulse towards harmony distracts the crueller drives. Contestants on a daytime talk show vie for the title of Biggest Sufferer of Outrageous Fortune. (I vote for the lady with two vaginas whose cheating husband has knocked up a male stripper.) But before the winner is declared, people have forgotten their troubles and descended into a telegenic orgy. Half the fun of There is so much mad in me lies in its surprising transitions from one kind of extreme to another. A more resonant pleasure is the parallel universes that Driscoll creates for states of mind we think we know inside out. She shakes off the familiar shell so that poignancies and absurdities emerge. Instead of just riding Michael Helland’s hips – code for “sex” – the brilliant Nikki Zialcita clamps on while hanging upsidedown and shrieks and whoops as if she were on a waltzer. Helland looks a little frightened as he struggles to restrain her – or is he trying to take her higher? It’s not clear. Nor is it clear whether Zialcita means to make a scene or keep her “feelings” under wraps. Her cheeks quiver, her lips part alluringly, her face devolves into jelly and composes itself again. Whenever There is so much mad in me sank into this delicious confusion between acting out and holding back – between the danger and the sweetness of “only connecting” – I wished the show could last all night.
Faye Driscoll Is Mad at You and You and You Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, April 12, 2010
The title of Faye Driscoll’s latest work, There is so much mad in me, holds the mirror up to a nature many people would rather not think about. Driscoll has only been presenting her dance-theater works since 2005, and already she has a reputation for serious provocation. She makes spectators squirm, and there’s an uneasy edge to the laughter she elicits in exploring our dark, pent-up, raging urges. I think back to the opening of her 2007 Wow Mom Wow at Dance New Amsterdam. Ten women crawled on stage and arranged themselves in a line, facing away from the audience. An interlocutor introduced each of them by name; faceless, they acknowledged us by little wiggles. By their butts, ye shall know them. In terms of courting extremes, There is so much mad in me goes beyond this and beyond Driscoll’s 837 Venice Blvd. That 2008 work presented three adults reinventing playground horrors and the plague-y adolescent search for identity in weird and wonderful ways. The new piece shows nine grownups unable to restrain their inner infants.
Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, April 12, 2010, page 2 Driscoll is interested in the fine lines between pain and pleasure, cruelty and empathy, uncontrolled greed and religious rapture. Along with bringing these polarities and others dangerously close to one another, she explores the act of voyeurism, especially the sort that we practice every time we rubber-neck a freeway accident or tune in to reality TV. In one scene in There is so much mad in me, Adaku Utah expertly and scarily recreates the tantrummy rant that Tyra Banks aimed at a 2006 contestant on America’s Next Top Model in 2006 (1,162,048 YouTube hits to date). In another, Jacob Slominski, repeatedly screams at all the performers to “GET DOWN! GET THE FUCK DOWN!”—shining his flashlight around for signs of noncompliance, stamping scarily close to their prone bodies, and doing a clumsy, effortfully butch scrap of dancing. He even tries to get a semi-prepared spectator to lie down in one of Dance Theater Workshop’s aisles. These two scenes of rage, cruelty, and public humiliation differ mainly in the degree of danger involved. Driscoll makes images morph into their opposites. Without evident transition, Utah turns into Oprah Winfrey announcing her great 2004 car giveaway, with the resulting over-the-top glee on the part of the all-winners audience. In one of the best scenes (and one of the few without spoken words), Michael Helland restrains Nikki Zialcita (two of the three brilliant performers in 837 Venice Blvd.) by holding both her hands as she tries to run forward. Squirming and giggling, she’s going nowhere, and since she persists for what seems like a very long time, her pleasure begins not just to look masochistic; it makes my own arms hurt. Jennie MaryTai Liu goes from hosting a let’s-talk-sex show (breast-baring by Lily Gold) to being a victim of confrontational revelations, while Jesse Zaritt solicits our applause and reactions. Our discomfort level may vary, but Driscoll seems to want to probe it. The overture that Brandon Wolcott’s sound design provides is very interesting (quiet bird sounds, mumbling, bits of music), but it goes on long enough to make you wonder when the show is going to start. On occasion, Amanda K. Ringger’s richly—sometimes ironically— supportive lighting may blast our eyes with an all-white glare. Zaritt’s bout with Tony Orrico ends in tickling, but Zaritt and Helland wrestle so exhaustingly that we might be watching the YouTube compendium of famous Jerry Springer show fights, and the wince component fades into a distantly horrified complacency. Except for a sexyme group number and an unusual, beguilingly awkward solo by Lindsay Clark (sometimes a shunned or heckled outsider), down-and-dirty, roll-on-the-floor fighting is the principal form of movement. You can tell that a lot of thought and experiment has gone into There is so much mad in me—both by Driscoll and by her tremendously gifted performers—yet it unabashedly announces itself as a mess, the kind of turbulent stew that pop culture and far-right-wing tirades have sucked us into. As such it’s exciting and disturbing, even though some major issues are diminished by the grownup-playground atmosphere. When I think back on the edgy relationship between tortured, hooded detainees and TV talent-show contestants that Jane Comfort probed in her devastating 2008 narrative, An American Rendition, the quick glimpse that Driscoll provides of that juxtaposition trivializes it— just one more cruel, embarrassing day in our famous lives. As the last line in There is so much mad in me—spoken quietly in the dark—warns us, who knows what to believe anymore? And, one might add, what to care about.
Crazy Mad
Faye Driscoll has issues
Gus Solomons, Jr., Gay City News, April 25, 2010 Faye Driscoll is a keen observer of human behavior and she’s plugged into the pulse of downtown art. One of her video works was shown in the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” triennial last year. In her new dance/ performance work “There is so much mad in me” at Dance Theater Workshop (March 31-April 3), images range from hilarious to horrific in an examination of why people will do anything to be seen and why we are irresistibly drawn to watch them, especially when they are in extremis. Driscoll is fiercely theatrical, and she deploys her cast of nine to maximum effect onstage and throughout the auditorium. What’s more, Driscoll really has something interesting to say and isn’t afraid to yell it in your face. The passionate commitment of her performers –– who dance, act, and sing –– can’t fail to arouse emotion, as they hurl themselves headlong into this media-spawned world of flash mobs and reality TV. But Driscoll’s sniper’s accuracy is anything but a cheap shot. Nikki Zialcita wags her hips and struggles toward us like an eager puppy straining at its leash, while Michael Helland clamps his hands onto her hips to restrain her. After she chest-bumps him, she launches gleefully into a hip-hop routine with bumping-and-grinding that draws a crowd, which rewards her exhibitionism with candy and flowers. Aduka Utah, in crimson pantsuit and Afro-Mohawk and standing on a mini-dais with a hand mic, alternately encourages and excoriates a cowering Jesse Zaritt, like a sadistic talent show host-cum-football coach. Then, she switches into a magnanimous Oprah, offering Zialcita a makeover and promising everyone a new car. That sends the cast into pandemonium — wildly screaming, whooping, and scampering around the stage. Stage-struck Lindsay Clark, a dazed fawn, wanders around gazing at us, and despite enthusiastic encouragement from the group, she refuses to sing her song. She joins Zaritt and Tony Orrico in a trio that circles the space, with the men taking turns getting lifted by the other two in slow motion as each leaps and skitters up the wall. Zaritt goes overboard wrestling with Helland and retreats to a corner with an embarrassed combination of bravado and chagrin. Then the two guys try to win Clark’s attention in a competition of verbal carrots and sticks. The emotional climax of Act One begins in the dark with Jacob Slominski wielding a flashlight and screaming at the top of his lungs, “Get down! Get the fuck down!,” like a deranged cop. His whole body trembles, as he tries to enforce his orders on everyone in the room –– no exceptions. And after this deeply disturbing and colossally powerful moment, Clark finally finds the courage to sing. The
Gus Solomons, Jr., Gay City News, April 25, 2010, page 2 others join her, one by one, in multi-part harmony — “What does it sound like when you sing heaven’s song…? In the second part, Jennie Mary Tai Liu hosts a confessional talk show, ala Jerry Springer. She declares, “There are five women with me here and ten vaginas!” One of the “women” is actually Helland, who tells her which of his vaginas is dominant and the fact that, alas, he has only one clitoris. Lily Gold flashes her comely boobs, and the hilariously disgusting conversation offers too much information about sexual preferences and identities, marital celibacy, lesbian infidelity, eating disorders –– pick your perversion. Even though the cast includes some noted postmodern technicians, the “dancing” consists of bouncing up and down in unison or a group aerobics routine, done to a bass-and-drum thumping beat. Nonetheless, dance clearly prevails. Orrico gets stripped to his skivvies and chased by an angry mob. The chase gradually morphs into a unison jog in neat pairs, traversing the stage in innumerable paths, while at the rear of the audience, a couple wages a heated discussion. At last, he requests, “Tell me what you’re feeling,” and she replies, “I don’t know.”
Scenes From Reality TV and Other Madness Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, April 1, 2010
With a sure idea of how much or how little it takes to fill a stage with madness — in the sense of euphoria, hysteria, desperation and rage — the choreographer Faye Driscoll’s new work explores extreme states, from those found in actual wars to the sort of battles waged on television shows like “Jerry Springer.” Near the start of “There is so much mad in me,” a work for nine performed at Dance Theater Workshop on Wednesday night, Nikki Zialcita stands at the back of a stage wiggling her hips and inching forward while another dancer, Michael Helland, holds her arms, reining her back like a horse. Bathed in tangerine light, Ms. Zialcita, squealing and smiling through the pain — for her, it seems, there is pleasure in it — then sprints ahead as Mr. Helland restrains her. In this scene, as in many that follow, bodies press together in poses of rapture and ecstasy that quickly dissolve into images of wrestling, torture and even dancing. Yet while Ms. Driscoll depicts extreme images throughout her new work, the piece itself is never extreme enough. In exploring society’s propensity for voyeurism, she takes an all-too-easy route by enacting a famous scene from “America’s Next Top Model,” in which Tyra Banks — played by Adaku Utah with exacting hysteria — chews out a contestant for not trying hard enough. “Stop it!” she screams. “I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this!” Next, Ms. Utah (presumably as Oprah Winfrey) gives away cars; here the cast’s feverish shrieks and jumps give way to bopping, unison dancing that pops vividly in front Amanda K. Ringger’s colorful lighting. But after a fight erupts between Jesse Zaritt and Mr. Helland, another scene develops in which Jacob Slominski forces the cast members to lie on the floor like prisoners. (He also tries out his
Gia Kourlas, The New York Times, April 1, 2010, page 2 cop-show intimidation act on the audience; he is more of a screamer than Ms. Utah, and that is saying something.) Unfortunately, this sort of trivial television realism dominates more of the work than it should; Ms. Driscoll may know how to organize her chaotic scenes, but they remain formulaic. Toward the end of the piece, a talk-show host notes that the bigger issue at stake is intimacy, and suddenly Ms. Driscoll seems as preachy as Tyra Banks — but without the awkward laughs. Faye Driscoll continues performances through Saturday at Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 924-0077; dancetheaterworkshop.org.
A Dark Shade of Light
Faye Driscoll’s “There is so much mad in me” unleashes nine souls at DTW Quinn Batson, Offoffoff, April 5, 2010
There is so much mad in me takes everything Faye Driscoll has worked with and binds it together to create an emotional monsterpiece, a beautiful rollercoaster of feeling and sensation. Ecstasy runs right into tragedy over and over again, with perfectly paced moments of silent wound-licking between rounds. Blinding white light and noise accompanies the performers streaming down the aisles of DTW toward the stage to open what may be the widest-ranging piece I’ve seen. Onstage, clumps of two and three performers interact in a vague place between human and animal, with an amazing feral growl coming from one as the scene ends. Nikki Zialcita and her inimitable private gigglejoy are stars of the show and the first thing we see onstage next, shadowed or peopled by someone behind her, the first of many strange moments of inhabitation or coupling that involve one more body than seems natural, like a physical manifestation of the “mad” in each. Joy at the edge of madness is a frequent visitor onstage, an ecstasy so fragile it is scary to watch, and Zialcita does this better than anyone, making us bellylaugh while we wait for the breakdown. As her hidden body partner becomes more and more visible, the two begin to interact and intertwine, eventually leading to hilarious swinging moments of “wheeee” where Zialcita is enjoying herself with legs wrapped around her lover/self/alterego. At some point she breaks free and begins happily slapping herself silly in a rhythmic slapdance that eventually draws everyone else onstage to form a dance circle to egg her on and eventually reward her with flowers and chocolates. This theme of group excitement also comes back again and again, and it is not always quite so bright and shiny. The first hint of this comes when the silent and oblivious Lindsay Clark wanders onstage just as the celebration is peaking to stand directly in front of Zialcita and squash her moment. Oddly, the crowd quickly forgets Nikki and starts asking, then commanding Lindsay to “sing her song”, even beginning to rough her up a bit as she stays mute, happiness quickly turning to darkness, another common occurrence. If the occasional growls and shrieks aren’t enough, Tony Orrico coming out to literally climb the wall downstage is yet another semi-literal reference to being a bit mad, with onlookers coming to encourage him until things devolve into upsidedown feet tickling his neck. Throughout, sound design by Brandon Wolcott and lighting design by Amanda K. Ringger do a wonderful job
Quinn Batson, Offoffoff, April 5, 2010, page 2 of conveying love and madness, joy and violence, happy darkness. Both sound and light alternate between subtle and severe quickly. Music that is so spare and joyful for much of the early part of the piece, and lighting during a big group eighties-music-video dance section that cycles through bright background colors while the group stays lit in white, stick in mind, but moments of darkness get masterful light and sound as well. The performances by Lindsay Clark, Lily Gold, Michael Helland, Jennie MaryTai Liu, Tony Orrico, Jacob Slominski, Adaku Utah, Jesse Zaritt, and Nikki Zialcita are superb, emotionally and physically. In the course of the show, there are religious-style revival meetings, group rapes and physical fights and their emotional aftermath, and even a Springer-style deviant-sex talk show that, as usual here, begins quite humorously and ends badly as the entire group chases and brutally beats down the slightly-too-sexually-active Tony. The darkness and violence are so wrenching and real at moments, so much more so than the hysterical happiness that pervades much of the rest of the piece, and yet the chillout moments between high drama are so soft and sad and exhausted that the overall flow of the piece always feels natural. Madness in every guise is included here, yet humor and ambiguity keep things from ever falling off a cliff, also true to life. A big fight scene between Michael Helland and Jesse Zaritt is a good example and a sort of pivot in the piece. After Jesse beats Michael and gloats way too much for the fight-provoking crowd, the two play a twisted triangle with Lindsay to cajole her to sing, both manipulating furiously, one bribing and the other commanding. When Lindsay finally does sing her song, she is joined by first one, then two, then the entire group, who sing a beautiful spiritual song about “when heaven comes down, what does it look/feel/sound like when God is all around.” This could be the uplifting ending, and indeed gives that impression at first, but like Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, “...so much mad...” has multiple endings, and only one is unconflicted. A possible ending before the singing one is so dark and psychotically angry, via Jacob Slominski, that any trace of fun is far away. The ultimate ending, with a voice-distorted domestic argument from hell over a group jogging slowly and in rhythmic synchronicity like a military unit around a darkened stage and up and down the aisles, has just the right mix of tragedy and comedy and ends with an exchange that most in the audience can appreciate — man:”I just want to know what you’re feeling.” woman: “I don’t know.”
There Was So Much Feeling In This
Susan Yung, Thirteen New York Public Media Sundayarts Blog, April 7, 2010 Faye Driscoll is the latest artist to figure out how to use DTW’s big theater to best advantage. Her incredible dancers contributed greatly to the success of There is so much mad in me, which ran through last weekend. Driscoll says it concerns “a craving to feel, to connect through the vehicle of extreme experience.” And experience we did as the performers moved among us, celebrating, bullying, taking bows. By the end, we felt implicated in the performance, rather than simply observers. Nikki Zialcita, a compact dynamo, tiptoed forward, supported by Michael Helland. She seemed positively exhilarated at every weight shift, shrieking as if each tiny step were a thrilling plunge off a cliff. The other eight dancers surrounded her, and we weren’t sure if they were intimidating her or supporting her. These blurred lines between terror and pleasure, love and abuse (tickling is a fine example), pervade the evening’s proceedings. Driscoll raises questions about what qualifies as dance. Much of the movement is action rather than what we understand to be traditional choreography. Other sections, including an expressionistic solo performed by Lindsay Clark, show Driscoll’s history as a performer with Doug Varone. Then there are powerful dramatic sections based on talk/reality shows, with Adaku Utah channeling Oprah, enacting the car-giveaway episode, which elicited from the cast blood-curdling screams so loud, and physical contortions so sudden and extreme, that it was hard to tell whether they were from pain or ecstasy. (Jane Comfort also paralleled reality TV and torture in her outstanding work, American Rendition, last year.) The theater went black and only a flashlight provided light for a man terrorizing the cowering dancers. He harangued an audience member (a plant) to sit on the floor as well, just before the house lights blazed to an unbearable brightness. Jennie MaryTai Liu, as Naomi Campbell, prodded the performers to reveal their innermost secrets. It felt like the old game telephone, evolving and taking on more and more absurd premises, and yet the ludicrous nature of the genre said that anything might be true. The group formed two columns and jogged around the stage in different formations as one or two broke off to perform an action or dance. The jogging took on the air of a military exercise—were we watching dance, or prep for a war? Or both? Set designer Sara C. Walsh pushed the stage nearly to the side walls, which were covered with plastic. Brandon Wolcott designed the excellent sound (with music from Ian McIntosh and Michael Wall). Amanda K. Ringger designed the powerful lighting, which included bands of intense color lining the upstage floor. Lily Gold, Tony Orrico, Jacob Slominski, and Jesse Zaritt rounded out the talented cast which seemed to give us everything they had. Indeed, we felt.
Rave on, dancers! Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Question for choreographer Faye Driscoll: What on earth did you do to your dancers to get them this way? Now, hold on: That is not a hostile question. In fact, I think it’s a question a lot of envious choreographers might want to get answered, because Driscoll’s effectiveness in her new piece, There is so much mad in me, is almost totally due to the blasted-open vulnerability and bravery of her nine performers. Let’s name them, right off the bat: Lindsay Clark, Lily Gold, Michael Helland, Jenny MaryTai Liu, Tony Orrico, Jacob Slominski, Adaku Utah, Jesse Zaritt and Nikki Zialcita. These guys are astonishingly good, and each gets pushed forward in ways that bring out his or her breathtaking power. Each one seems capable of a full course of possibilities--from delicate sparks of thought and expression flickering across their faces to full-tilt rage, and even the rage comes in 47 varieties. Doubt me on that last one, and I’ll tell you to just watch one of Slominski’s characters brutally intimidate his colleagues--and at least one audience member, too--and see what secrets his subsequent facial and bodily movements reveal not only about his perverse pleasure in instilling fear but also his childish petulance and repressed hysteria. The work--charging through 75 minutes in which you never relax enough to worry about the time--is a seamless collage of intense scenarios depicting extreme, mind-pounding, mind-blowing experiences. Sounds like fun? Well, don’t trust elation; it quickly turns to terror. And nobody does “quickly” like Driscoll and her crew. This rapid slippage and the ambiguity of just about everything you’re seeing reach out past that so-called fourth wall and wreak havoc with your own body-mind continuum. How do you really feel about the disturbing things you’re watching? Not the funny moments--of which there are a goodly amount--but the exploitation, the oppression, the violence? You’ll be sitting with that. Yes. This is one of those dances that examines you every bit as much as you examine it. I wish it wide presentation throughout America. There is so much mad in me runs through Saturday evening with 7:30pm shows at Dance Theater Workshop. Last night’s show was sold out. Best of luck. Click here for tickets to one of this season’s top premieres and performances.
One Dancer’s Vision
Faye Driscoll blends mind and body in performance art Natalie Axton, The Weekly Standard, October 11, 2010
All day, every day, from the middle of March through the end of May, performance artist Marina Abramovic sat at the Museum of Modern Art in her performance piece, The Artist is Present. This appearance was Abramovic’s contribution to the eponymous MoMA retrospective running in the gallery space four flights above. Clothed in a full-length gown, her brown hair braided to one side, she sat in a wooden straight-back chair in a demarcated performance space within the museum’s Marron Atrium and allowed museum-goers, one at a time, to sit opposite her for as long as they chose. One sitter, philosopher, art critic, and contributor to the exhibition catalogue, Arthur Danto, described his participation. After taking his place and contacting her with a shy wave, artist and audienceparticipant reached a kind of communion, which he described in the New York Times: At this point, something striking took place. Marina leaned her head back at a slight angle, and to one side. She fixed her eyes on me without—so it seemed—any longer seeing me. It was as if she had entered another state. I was outside her gaze. Her face took on the translucence of fine porcelain. She was luminous without being incandescent. She had gone into what she had often spoken of as a “performance mode.” For me at least, it was a shamanic trance—her ability to enter such a state is one her gifts as a performer. It is what enables her to go through the physical ordeals of some of her famous performances. I felt indeed as if this was the essence of performance in her case, often with the added element of physical danger. The 63-year-old Abramovic emerged from Eastern Europe’s art scene in the early 1970s, one of many “ordeal art” performance artists who became famous for taking ideas of the body as performance subject and art object (or vice versa) to an extreme. In Rhythm 10, Abramovic spread her hand palm-down on the floor and rapidly jabbed a knife between (and occasionally into) her fingers. In the followup Rhythm 0 she stood passively in a gallery surrounded by objects, including a loaded gun, a rose, a bunch of grapes, and a knife and invited onlookers to do whatever they wanted to her. “I use my body for an experiment,” she told one audience in 1974 before taking pills that sent her into convulsions. This time, despite one participant’s attempt to vomit on her, Abramovic was hardly in danger. On the contrary, the MoMA under director Glenn Lowry is moving in the direction of “interactive” exhibits—Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano was in the atrium this past July—as part of a broader curatorial effort to create a repertory of the performance art movement of the 1970s and ’80s. Many of Abramovic’s former colleagues do not agree with this attempt at re-creation: Their performances were meant to happen once, and once only. But art goes on. What began in New York as a playful (and naïve) art-for-art’s-sake movement has become, thanks in part to political controversy, canon. With this show, a new biography, and an appearance at the Whitney, Abramovic is the movement’s reigning queen.
Natalie Axton, The Weekly Standard, October 11, 2010, page 2 The “danger” Abramovic has sought for her creative work is this state of emotional exhaustion and physical pain: It might yield personal fulfillment, but it does not create theater. Sitting all day in the MoMA—no food, no potty breaks—was, no doubt, exhausting; but there is remarkably little artistry in The Artist is Present. It’s pure manipulation in a room full of people watching one person watch an art star. This is the kind of work for which the German term ein Stück is apt: a kind of secular David Blaine magic act, an artful semi-retirement. And yet, regardless of its fatuousness, performance art can be enjoyed as live action, as metaphysical riddle: Was it Abramovic’s physical suffering that made this performance art and not celebrity worship? Is the suffering an act? Is the audience complicit? These are the kinds of questions that keep university art and theater departments in business. And the university is the place where the young avant-garde is reared. If, as Danto has written, the end (or the limit) of art is philosophy, the limit of dance is history. Art is concept; dance is action. And at the beginning of the 21st century we see dances about dances about dances. This exaggerated determination can have the ironic effect of removing the dance movement from the dance. As dance has become more experimental, performance art has moved into more formalized settings. The two disciplines have created an uncomfortable overlap, and it’s hard to know who’s doing what—especially from the funding, presenting, and reviewing perspectives. The dance artist Faye Driscoll is one inheritor of this messy legacy. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and one of Dance magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2008, Driscoll has been quietly building a reputation as a serious artist. Her latest full length show, There is so much mad in me, appeared last spring at Dance Theater Workshop, New York’s premiere contemporary dance venue. DTW presented There is so much mad in me in a return engagement late last month, and with that show, Driscoll proved her creative voice is reaching maturity, and that she might be the only dance artist attuned to contemporary anxieties of intimacy, and the ironies of a society that “overshares.” Driscoll’s work explores the limits of empathy in our post-9/11, digitized world through a lens of hyper-emotional physicality. Oscillating between verbal and non-verbal communication, her dancers are always on the edge, insecure, needy, overconfident. This, in performance-speak, is a post-evolutionary vision; but the world (and it is a world) of There is so much mad in me is Darwinist from the start. Nine dancers in colorful street clothes enter the empty, white performance space following an overture of birdsong designed by sound engineer Brandon Wolcott. Biologists think birdsong, like human speech, is an arrangement of consonants and vowels; dance is an arrangement of step sequences. When the overture ends, the dancers have formed a circle around dancer Nikki Zialcita. They’re looking at her, and she’s staring down the audience. She hunches and growls at two men, one of whom is cradling the other and pulling an imaginary hook through his cheek. This encounter sets the tone for the 75-minute work, the movement of which will strike a ballet or traditional modern dance audience as undisciplined. But again, dance is action. The action in There is so much mad in me is a development of Driscoll’s previous work, particularly her autobiographical 837 Venice Blvd. This show is decidedly darker. In its opening duet Zialcita, one of New York’s most compelling performers, wiggles, giggles, and shimmies towards the audience while Michael Helland holds her arms behind her back. It’s hard to know whether he is hurting her, or trying to hurt her, as the duet becomes more intense. But she seems to enjoy it and laughs giddily. When he starts swinging her upside down, and she tries to keep her skirt from falling down, Helland remains impassive while controlling her. Zialcita body-slams him, NFL-style, to get a reaction; but that doesn’t work. She slaps her body, first at Helland, then for its own sake. The rest of the group, attracted by the commotion, comes onstage to watch. They cheer her on with real enthusiasm and, when she stops, congratulate her with a box of chocolates and bouquet of flowers. If this sounds like reality television, that’s because it is. To create this work Driscoll gave the performers images
Natalie Axton, The Weekly Standard, October 11, 2010, page 3
which they, in turn, used to conjure emotions. It’s a process of “researching through the body,” in the words of dancer Jacob Slominski, to generate movement. Images drive the work, but they are as fluid and graphic as their meanings are personal: A prisoner turns into a dog into a burlesque performer, a fight turns into a church social into a rave. The group starts in a motionless circle but finishes in a marching phalanx. These microshifts are made possible by Driscoll’s strong direction and structural design. Trios, duos, a false ending, singing, blackouts, and kitsch each has its proper place. Driscoll also samples television. When Adaku Utah, clad in red denim and a Mohawk hairdo, steps onto a riser, her fist raised overhead, she’s a Black Power figure and demagogue of materialism. Riffing on talk show hosts, she declares that no one in the audience is taking this seriously enough—and we’ve all won new cars! (The fourth wall is breached expertly by lighting designer Amanda K. Ringger.) The dancers, who have become an audience, rush the stage, screaming. Later they re-create a famous/ notorious episode of the Tyra Banks talk show (“Five Women, Ten Vaginas”) with a gay twist, ending in a brawl. This is important: If dance is becoming history, it is manifestly a history of sex. The sensibility that aggression is the most authentic representation of life, love, and art pervades the dance and performance community. From So You Think You Can Dance to elite ballet companies, scenes of domestic violence have replaced the traditional, romantic pas de deux. These duets all vary on the direction to “run together, embrace, punch, run away, repeat.” For this we can thank Twyla Tharp, whose duet “That’s Life” in her seminal Sinatra Suite (1984), which updated the danse apache for the American concert audience, was created for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Elaine Kudo. This power struggle was one piece of Tharp’s statement, and unfortunately it has become an end in itself. The ballet world is so mired in this misery that many choreographers are turning to traditional narrative ballets to escape it. Several of New York City Ballet’s premieres last spring were throwbacks: Christopher Wheeldon’s Estancia, a fairy tale on a ranch; Melissa Barak’s Call Me Ben, a bio-ballet of the founding of Las Vegas; Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna: A Grand Divertissement, an abstraction on the theme of classical ballet. George Balanchine insisted that a man and a woman onstage made a story. Today we need man, woman, horses, skyscrapers, goofy costumes, sailors, and bathing caps. Perhaps the renaissance of performance art corresponds to our anxieties in the age of terrorism. What in Marina Abramovic’s time was defined as a crisis of the body is now a crisis of community, and many are capitalizing on this rage of rage. But Faye Driscoll questions the audience’s complicity in the culture of voyeurism and doesn’t deliver on it. She is the most promising performing artist of her generation.
There is so much mad in me
Evan Namerow, Dancing Perfectly Free, April 3, 2010 Choreographer Faye Driscoll pushes the physical, emotional, and psychological limits of the nine courageous dancers in There is so much mad in me, a riveting world premiere that opened on Wednesday evening at Dance Theater Workshop. The work explores extreme states of consciousness – everything from religious ecstasy to sex to torture – and through seamless, often unnoticeable transitions reveals the similarities of polar extremes. Driscoll’s program notes explained, “Torture looks like spiritual ritual, spiritual ritual looks like birth, birth sounds like sex, sex looks like wrestling, wrestling looks like rapture, rapture looks like dancing, and dancing looks like everything.” There is so much mad in me was a fast-paced rollercoaster of a show, but with demanding choreography and a string of highly effective scenarios, it remained well-structured and focused. In an opening duet, Nikki Zialcita shimmied forward as Michael Helland restrained her, but she seemed to grow more playful as he increasingly held her back. Several trios and duets revealed shifting dynamics in relationships and how suddenly torture can look like sex – and vice versa. Elsewhere, the dancers shifted from a rapturous prayer vigil to a raging party, from a gang fight to an orgy. Adaku Utah portrayed a convincing Tyra Banks as the piece mocked the insane level of drama and humiliation in reality television, and later, Jennie MaryTai Liu played a talk-show host who revealed far too much information about her guests. Sadly, the more she exposed the more animated and information-hungry the viewers became. The messages served up in these situations, which seemed rather dark underneath their humorous surface, were balanced with subtler, more poignant portrayals of group pressure, fear, trust issues, and loneliness. Whether they were entangled on the floor, climbing a wall, charging through the aisles, or pouring out one emotion after another, the cast showed full, fearless commitment to this emotionally and physically challenging piece. In fact, the dancers were so effective that their experiences were equally challenging for the audience. Lindsay Clark’s confusion about which man to trust was the audience’s confusion, and Jacob Slominski’s terrorizing rage pulsed through every person in the theater. At the same time, There is so much mad in me allows – even encourages – the audience to be voyeuristic. We witness and experience more emotions and socio-cultural issues than anyone can handle in a week, let alone a 75-minute performance, and yet media bombards us with this stuff on an ongoing basis. How much information is too much? Where do we draw the line between voyeurism and compassion? It’s rare and refreshing to experience a work that forces its cast and audience to be so emotionally and psychologically vulnerable. That’s exactly what Driscoll demands in There is so much mad in me. The result is thrilling, agonizing, mind-blowing, and revealing. There is so much mad in me continues tonight at Dance Theater Workshop. The entire exceptional cast is Lindsay Clark, Lily Gold, Michael Helland, Jennie MaryTai Liu, Tony Orrico, Jacob Slominski, Adaku Utah, Jesse Zaritt, and Nikki Zialcita.
Chopping Through Boundaries of Growth Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, November 16, 2008
Every section of Faye Driscoll’s “837 Venice Blvd” is just too long for comfort. And it’s just long enough to confirm that Ms. Driscoll is a startlingly original talent, capable of creating work that slyly blurs the real and the theatrical, memory and fantasy, the past and the present self. The title refers to Ms. Driscoll’s childhood home in Los Angeles. Whether or not the piece, which opened at the Here Arts Center on Thursday, is autobiographical, it directly concerns the memories and emotions of childhood and the way those bleed into adult identity. In the opening section Celia Rowlson-Hall offers a wobbly voiced song (based on Will Oldham’s “I Am a Cinematographer”) full of memories of growing up, as she alternately shadowboxes and jerks her head stiffly to one side. Her increasingly surreal narrative ends with a plea, repeated with increasing volume: “I’m waiting to grow up. I’m waiting for you to love me enough. I’m waiting for the show.” And here Ms. Driscoll sums up all human need in three neat lines and offers a witty meta-comment on her own work. She knows that we are waiting for the show too. (What’s all this funny singing, and where’s the dancing?) And she proceeds to give us one. In several subsequent sections — all funny, shocking and moving in equal measure — Ms. Driscoll sets her three dancers (Michael Helland, Ms. Rowlson-Hall and Nikki Zialcita) at one another’s throats both physically and metaphorically. At any moment they might be siblings, friends or enemies, and they brilliantly evoke the adolescent torture of being excluded from the “in” group (a peanut butter sandwich is in play here) and the coruscating hatred that rejection can cause to flow through human veins. A solo for Ms. Zialcita is a dazzling evocation of childhood fantasy superimposed on female stereotypes as she grimaces and karate-chops through a superhero episode, occasionally switching to a sexy pelvic grind or a comehither tongue flutter. A duet for Mr. Helland and Ms. Rowlson-Hall in which they stagger about the stage, laughing manically and manipulating each other’s limbs and bodies like vicious puppet masters, is followed by a deadpan dance of clunky, resentment-filled aerobics moves to Jacno’s electronic pop score. In all of these — and in the final section, which has a passive Ms. Rowlson-Hall carried and lifted balletically by the other two (oddly reminiscent of “The Unanswered Question” section of Balanchine’s “Ivesiana”) — Ms. Driscoll makes movement the vehicle of meaning, the repository of the inexpressible emotions that seethe beneath our surfaces. Identity may be at issue in “837 Venice Blvd,” but Ms. Driscoll’s is clear: she is an artist.
When Puppet and Puppeteer Switch Places Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, February 25, 2008
It’s not often that a piece makes you sit up straighter, wondering what it is exactly you are seeing, but these are the moments that lovers of the arts live for. And it happened on Thursday night at Dance New Amsterdam, which presented the first program of “Gene Pool,” a selection of offerings from 10 choreographers who all teach there. In Faye Driscoll’s “837 Venice Boulevard” two dancers (Michael Helland and Celia Rowlson-Hall) lurch onto the stage, laughing manically and holding each other up. For several minutes they stagger around the stage, her arm around his neck, as he manipulates her limbs like a violent puppet master. Then they switch roles, and she pumps his arms, pulls his leg into a brutal stretch, and shakes his head side to side and up and down. (“No no no, yes yes yes,” she says.) All the while they laugh, and although the audience did too, Ms. Driscoll’s rigorous exploration of this physical — and, it seems, mental — manipulation feels startlingly original in its peculiar configuration of slapstick and darkness. Less powerful is a second section in which the dancers do a deadpan routine to electronic pop (by Jacno) that mixes aerobics with clunky jazz dance moves, performed in the manner of earnest beginners. But Mr. Helland and Ms. Rowlson-Hall are no less brilliant here as seething frustration seeps through their banal movements.
THE YEAR IN CULTURE Drama, Razzle Dazzle And How to Survive Them Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, December 21, 2008 WHETHER a choreographer is just starting out or already established probably makes little difference to the mixture of hope and fear that must pervade every aspect of creating a new piece: the choices that must be made, the deadlines that must be met; the judgments that will be meted out. But as Jérôme Bel, always good at pointing out the obvious, reminded us: “The Show Must Go On.” And in some of the best new dance pieces of 2008 these five choreographers put on quite a show. 1. In April, Stephen Petronio created a gorgeously sexy, glamorous world in “Beauty and the Brut,” set to a commissioned electronic score by the art-world darlings known as Fischerspooner. The music offered a deadpan female voice telling a tale of seduction while the dancers told Mr. Petronio’s tale of kinetic drama, their limbs whiplashing through space, their bodies curving sculpturally in Ken Tabachnik’s seaand-sky lighting. 2. John Jasperse’s “Pure,” at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., in June, offered a beguiling conflation of sensuously curving, formally deliberate movement and often humorous, satisfyingly inexplicable sections in which dancers critiqued their own improvisations or scuttled furtively across the stage. Mr. Jasperse briefly plays a magician in the piece, and he indeed pulls an enchanting rabbit out of his choreographic hat. 3. Most people don’t choose to try out a new idea for the first time on a paying audience, but Mr. Bel, who creates mesmerizing dance pieces without ever choreographing a step, is definitely not most people. At the French Institute in September he offered a surprise “survival guide to the audience,” an insightful, thought-provoking meditation on the elements of live performance and what we bring to them, infused with funny, sometimes moving gestures and little dances.
4. Faye Driscoll’s “837 Venice Blvd.,” presented at Here Arts in November, confirmed Ms. Driscoll as one of the most original talents on the contemporary dance scene. Evoking the raw intensity of childhood experience by way of showbiz razzle-dazzle, she suggests — through movement both virtuosic and clunky — that we are only a scary hairsbreadth away from our past. 5. The extraordinary coordinations of swooping, sliding, ducking torsos, stretchedto-the limit legs, slicing arms and endlessly inventive lifts in Wayne McGregor’s new “Infra” for the Royal Ballet in London last month showed that ballet can also be a contemporary art form. Under a banner of strolling electronic figures by the artist Julian Opie and to haunting music by Max Richter, Mr. McGregor created a work full of tiny human dramas and huge physical possibilities.
Being somebody
Apollinaire Scherr, foot in mouth (an ArtsJournal weblog), December 8, 2008 I once had dinner with a cinematographer. “There’s a song about you!” I exclaimed. “It goes, I AM a cin-e-muuh-TAW-grapher....” The cinematographer smiled: “Isn’t it the only song about us?” Yeah, probably. Which is one reason it works so well as prologue to Faye Driscoll’s “837 Venice Blvd,” the dancedrama that played at Here Arts Center in the South Village for ten days earlier this month, though it should have been for ten weeks. Like the dance, the Will Oldham song jumbles the strict specificities of a child’s world--the one job you imagine for yourself (cinematographer), because the word has six syllables and they go together well; the one address you’ve memorized (837 Venice Blvd), because it’s home and you want a name for that place--with the mammoth emotional terrain it takes adulthood to contract into a line. “I walked away from New York City,” sings the cinematographer in a wobbly voice. But by the next verse, he’s an adult: “And I walked away from everything that’s good.” The absoluteness of feeling may belong to childhood, but the generalization “everything that’s good” is grownup (just in time for the good to be gone.) Driscoll--age 33, recently included in Dance Magazine’s annual “25 to Watch” issue--captures the threshold between the first line of the song and the second. The three magnetic characters in “837 Venice Blvd” are playing dress-up with self-image and testing the rules of the game. One day they may forget there was a game; only the rules will remain. “837 Venice Blvd” offers a reprieve from that day and a confrontation with it. As addendum to “I am a Cinematographer,” Celia (Celia Rowlson-Hall) chants, “I’m waiting to grow up. I’m waiting to be young,” in that special drone of children singing a private epic to themselves. Celia has just strung together, like mismatched beads, many scary adventures, including that “the Russians put a nuclear bomb in [my family’s] TV and blew us into a thousand parts. I had to go to the doctor and get a thousand stitches. Over my heart.” She concludes, “I’m waiting for you to show. I’m waiting for the show.” And then the show--far enough away to prompt laughter and close enough to hit hard--begins. It’s the kind that Celia would have concocted with her family when “the Santa Ana winds blew through Topanga Canyon and we were a we. Weeeee!” Now that they’re torn asunder, the overriding theme will be “how exhausting it is to have to keep being somebody all the time” (that’s from the program notes). And how exhilarating. The dancers burst through the red velveteen curtain dividing HERE’s black box front to back and introduce themselves again and again. First to emerge is Michael (Michael Helland), with glittery headband, extra-short running shorts, and false eyelashes he loves so much, he wants you to love them, too--so he glances sidelong like Betty Boop as often as
Apollinaire Scherr, foot in mouth (an ArtsJournal weblog), December 8, 2008, page 2
possible. Scuttling behind him to guarantee that he become a cartoon is his puppetmeister and ventriloquist, Nikki (Nikki Zalcita). At one point she thrusts a fist between his legs. It begins to writhe--and squawk “I’m hungry!” What does the lubricious snake hunger for? What else?--a peanut butter and jam sandwich. When it’s his turn, Michael hoists Nikki up by her own petard, showing off her kung fu legs as she dangles in the air; he tries to twirl her tatas (they pertly resist); and he has her do the gangsta-girl squat ‘n’ talk. Their mutual manglings are hilarious--like a child mauling her baby-doll’s face, wringing its limbs, and squeezing all the stuffing from its body, all while cooing like her mother--but their aim is true. Nikki, for example, is tough. Hunkered down in a wide squat a few feet from the front row, she discovers the glories of her pelvis. She gyrates with such singlemindedness that Michael and Celia, who’ve been running and leaping and grabbing at each other in the background, wander over to stare. After a few minutes, Michael warns, “That’s weird, Nikki.” “837 Venice Boulevard” proceeds like child’s play, with one thing disintegrating into another. Nikki’s forays into Pelvis Power slide into an extended anime adventure in which she performs villain and heroine alike, thrusting herself through with her sword. Meanwhile, Michael and Celia disappear. Once Nikki’s fantasia comes to a ferocious end, she exits via the heavy black curtain that marks the wings, and there they are, behind the curtain, in a secret bedroom. (Kudos to Sara Walsh for the ingenious set.) No one ever exits 837 Venice Blvd. They just wake up from a self-engrossing dream to open a door--or a curtain, as it happens--on a kitchen, or living room, and people we weren’t expecting. (How could we be surprised when the inhabitants amount to three?)
Apollinaire Scherr, foot in mouth (an ArtsJournal weblog), December 8, 2008, page 3 About half way into the 80-minute show, just as we’re getting the hang of its digressive nature, the three don identical satiny capes and charge right at us. We straighten up: This is it! The Show. A dance number, with jazzy steps and unison, like on “So You Think You Can Dance.” But as usual when marshaled exuberance replaces distended, distractible whimsy, someone gets plowed under. Celia takes the routine as far as it goes, as far as she knows; Michael and Nikki keep going. Celia yells, “Wait! Wait!,” then realizes, “You practiced without me. You made stuff up behind my back.” They’re pretending not to hear her. They’re dancing and grinning. “Stop. Stop. STOP. STOPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP.” She unleashes a single, endless, throat-destroying scream. We’ve all done this--hurled our heart into our mouths to shout “Stop,” and the magic didn’t happen. Wanted something so simple and so entirely that it seemed impossible we wouldn’t get it. And then didn’t. It can make a person inconsolable for years--and ashamed, because the feeling comes direct from babydom. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to get over: it’s pure. The audience grows hushed while Celia channels the worst of adults--their special brand of tyranny, bigotry, hypocrisy. She strips Michael and Nikki of their “cape privileges”; trumpets her own virtue (“All I’ve ever wanted was to love you”); tells Michael to just try to make it with a woman (she dares him), and announces to Nikki that her calves are too thick for the fuck-me boots she covets and her family is disgusting, squatting buglike when they eat, and so is her craterous face. They watch, still and stupefied, like she were a rabid dog: you don’t need to know dog language to know the creature is mad. When the diatribe is over, they smooth her sweaty hair with her defeated hands and carry her through a winding solo of grief and aspiration. To keep being somebody, you’re always giving someone up. “837 Venice Boulevard” doesn’t just depict that wrenching routine, it performs it. Driscoll understands that at the heart of live theater are emotional distances (perspective, we might call it if this were a painting). She beams a light on theatrical self-fashioning, and lets you feel the scraps of being fluttering in the dark. In the shadows of the dance that Celia, Michael, and Nikki create between themselves is the haunted, shivery dance they do with us.
Faye Driscoll’s California Slideshow Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, November 19, 2008
Maybe it was a lengthy sojourn in her native California that prompted Faye Driscoll to re-examine her childhood and the environment in which she grew up, and then create 837 Venice Blvd. Although an announcement for the piece billed it as “a rigorous physical exploration into the question of identity,” several sagely employed theatrical devices distance the performers from memory-lane, psychiatrist’s-couch revelations. 837 emerges as a wild, ferocious, wrenching, and hilarious piece of dance theater, enacted by three collaborating artists who are all these things—sometimes simultaneously. In terms of the work’s structure and ambiance, Venice Beach, California, surely played a role—not its sea view but its population of free spirits, artists, street performers, beach body-builders, surfers, fortune tellers, nut cases, and…well, ordinary citizens. Established by a single entrepreneur as a combination of Coney Island and Venice, Italy, its grandest days as a resort are over. Driscoll takes her tone in part from its rag-tag theatricality. Two wooden supports as fat as telephone poles hold a red velvet curtain that allows for some shenanigans (heads poking out, fabric lashing from conflicts behind it). The first image is of Celia Rowison-Hall singing a breathless, increasingly surreal song based on Will Oldham’s “I Am a Cinematographer,” while alternating between handcranking an invisible camera and shaking her head furiously. Home movies, anyone? Ideas borrowed from puppetry serve to skew Driscoll’s and the performers’ recollections and identity markers. In the beginning, Nikki Zialcita, hidden behind Michael Helland, pushes him forward, moves his arms, and speaks in a phony simulacrum of Helland’s voice to create a swishy caricature of him. He cooperates in the illusion, although he remains embarrassedly aloof when her forearm, thrust at us between his legs, becomes a hungry talking penis. Then Helland gets behind Zialcita to present her as super-butch, sneering, and foul-mouthed. The 60-minute piece ends with a long disintegrating sequence in which the two of them carry Rowison-Hall through an extended ballet “solo.” It’s both funny and excruciating. Rowison-Hall is slender and long-limbed, and this is an aspiring dancer’s fantasy-nightmare. Her friends gamely hoist her and twist her, lift her legs high, make her soar. She feels (and is) beautiful. Most of the time. But this is exhausting for all three. At one point, they shove her up one of the two additional poles, and park her there, clinging like a monkey, while they
Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, November 19, 2008, page 2 take a panting time-out. Eventually, the positions they maul her into are blurred beyond recognition, and you ache for all three performers. Earlier, they frolic and squeal like kids running amok; they play favorites with a sandwich; they get scared and clutch one another; they dance together. But suddenly, as Helland and Rowison-Hall note, Zialcita starts “getting a little weird.” In the remarkable and virtuosic solo that ensues, she moves and grunts as if several forces were battling for her body and soul. The one that’s usually winning is the muscle-pumping, hunched-over, spoiling-for-a-fight dude; the others suggest a sexy female and the playful neighborhood pal. In the most arresting and disturbing sequence, the three perform in unison what might be a dance-school recital number wearing gold and red capes. Out of nowhere, Rowison-Hall calls a halt—no, howls at them to stop; they’re screwing up the routine. She then launches into a hair-raising monologue, morphing from what might be an angry chum to a disappointed teacher or ranting parent into a hatred-spewing, homophobic, racist bigot. I believe that the words she shouts to tear them down may represent Helland’s and Zialcita’s own worst imaginings as to what others might think of them, because, while the two stand mute and humble, she denigrates Helland for his homosexuality and Zialcita for her Philippine background. What she snarls at them for what seems a very long time is so shockingly over the top and eventually so absurd that you laugh even as you cringe. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Rowison-Hall’s performance is how she begins to crumple—her voice breaking, her eyes filling—so that this time when she says, “You might as well die,” she’s talking about herself, and the others take her hands and make them stroke her into calmness. What I’ve written doesn’t convey the subtleties and the transitions that the script and the wonderful performers explore. 837 Venice Blvd, directed as well as choreographed by Driscoll, is full of surprises. So is Sara C. Walsh’s set. Several times, performers retreat into, or make a break for, the spaces offstage behind the black side curtains, giving us fleeting glimpses of “the real world” outside this circus: a tiny patio on one side, where Rowlson-Hall and Helland retreat to drink lemonade during Zialcita’s identity crisis; on the other, a living room couch and lit-up table lamp; also, a kitchen with white cabinets, into which Rowlson-Hall rushes in an effort to shake her “handlers.” The Here Art Center’s announcement for Driscoll’s show also mentioned “how exhausting it is to keep being somebody all the time.” That’s certainly a subject this crazily brave and devastating work plunges into. To the hilt.
Lost in the funhouse
Faye Driscoll displays the dark side of growing up Elizabeth Zimmer, Metro, November 17, 2008
Faye Driscoll, a Southern California native, had a career as a virtuoso dancer and still stayed in touch with how it feels to be an awkward, friendless child. She does not appear in “837 Venice Blvd.,” but the performers who do - Celia Rowlson-Hall, Michael Helland, and Nikki Zialcita - unveil a winning and terrifying emotional landscape. RowlsonHall, a skinny brunette in bare feet, sings like a female Daniel Johnson, lyrics of isolation and confusion based on work by Will Oldham. She’s joined by a cute boy with a fist - someone else’s - thrust between his legs, a sort of talking penis that both attracts her and threatens her. They represent middle schoolers, acting out their fascination with sex and gender roles, channeling their parents’ resentful tones, manifesting adolescent cruelty and erotic obsessions. At one point Helland and Zialcita shove Rowlson-Hall up a “tree” and leave her there. They are BFFs and enemies. Surrounded by red velvet and black curtains, they manipulate one another’s bodies and emotions, displaying the ability to leap, fly, seduce, connect. Zialcita, a compact Filipina adept at a range of martial arts moves, both pushes the others away and lures them, handing them golden gapes appliqued with the numerals of Driscoll’s childhood address. The hourlong show contians about 30 minutes of powerful material, but the young dancers sitting around me were entranced throughout: the piece speaks to the lives they led as latchkey children in a sex-obsessed culture. Driscoll is the future; catch her while you can.
Childhood Revisited
Pamela Lewis, Stage and Cinema, November 19, 2009 Bette Davis famously remarked that old age was not for sissies. Neither is youth, at least not as it’s presented in 837 Venice Boulevard, which is about to finish its brief run at HERE Arts Center on November 22. Written and choreographed by Faye Driscoll in collaboration with the play’s three performers (Michael Helland, Celia Rowlson-Hall and Nikki Zialcita), the work is featured as part of HERE’s 2008-09 mainstage season of new multidisciplinary productions that includes theater, dance, puppetry, and multimedia works. Regardless of what the quality of one’s youth might have been, looking back on it is a courageous act. Remembrance of both its wondrous and woeful episodes can batter the soul, with regret being the usual aftertaste. The exhaustingly motoric dancers of 837 Venice Boulevard (the title comes from Ms. Driscoll’s childhood home address in Los Angeles) do not so much take us through Ms. Driscoll’s early youth as they do dance, push, and hurl us through it, revealing all of its knockabout savagery, its seal-our-friendship-with-spit bonding, its fears, and its fantasies. From the opening moments of this dance theater piece, when we first meet Celia performing a spinning hand dance while singing lyrics based on Will Oldham’s “I am a Cinematographer,” we know we are entering fraught territory. Once Michael and Nikki join in, movement is incessant, with the three performers at turns manipulating and being manipulated like puppets and puppeteers, at other times executing endless in-and-out steps, vaguely evoking one of Balanchine’s plotless ballets. Each performer gets his or her chance to regale us, the most impressive offering being from Ms. Zialcita, a diminutive powerhouse who at once invites us into her fantasy world where she exercises complete control and gets the praise perhaps denied her in real life. But, as Ms. Driscoll explained (in an interview included in the program notes), her play is more than an examination of either her particular childhood or of childhood generally, but “more the emotional landscape: the feeling of loneliness, of being loved, and the silliness of fantasy.” Through Celia and her friends, as they roll on the floor and engage in the kind of physical manipulation at which children can excel, Ms. Driscoll examines the complicated constructs of identity and the various ways in which we all blame each other, and how exhausting it is to have to “be somebody” all the time, as is loudly expressed in the play’s climactic passage.
Pamela Lewis, Stage and Cinema, November 19, 2009, page 2 Fair enough. These are ancient and important themes, always worthy of examination. The question is how they are examined. Ms. Driscoll gives her three interpreters lots to do; their athleticism is breathtaking (literally and figuratively), giving the play a raw and feverish quality. The coltish Ms. Rowlson-Hall brings a vulnerability to her part, giving herself completely to the physical and emotional demands of her part, and Mr. Helland is graceful but can tap into a more maniacal power when it’s needed. For this reviewer, however, the hysterical and almost unrelenting wildness of the action seriously overwhelmed and undermined the very themes in question. Although Ms. Driscoll’s interest is in narrative, as she also discussed in her interview, she prefers that the narrative contain ambiguity so that the viewer can project his or her own experience. Narrative in 837 is not only missing in action, but missing because of action, buried, as it were, by so much physicality. Ms. Driscoll recommends that we be open to this type of work, but when solid storytelling is sacrificed, that’s asking a lot.
25 to Watch in 2008 Wendy Perron, Dance Magazine, January 2008 FAYE DRISCOLL No to prettiness, no to glamour, no to glistening muscular limbs. Yes to intensity, yes to body heat, yes to wildness, freedom, and in-your-face defiance. Faye Driscoll has produced a giddy anarchism we haven’t seen since the fake blood-and-nudity hilarity of DanceNoise in the 1980s. The sexuality in her latest piece, Wow Mom, Wow, is more basic than heterosexuality. The dancers are doggies who hump or cats who claw. They are also young women who speak their hopes and fears while slamming a brush through their hair. But underneath the wild child antics is a rigorous sense of craft. Some of the episodes refer back to the past and enlarge it. The effect is cumulative. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Driscoll has danced with Doug Varone, David Neumann, and Yasmeen Godder. Wow Mom, Wow opened at Dance New Amsterdam, where Driscoll teaches. This month she appears at HERE Arts Center in Manhattan, and in the spring she’s at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and Brooklyn College. In the summer she’ll head to San Francisco’s West Wave festival and The Key City Playhouse in Port Townsend, WA.
Mother Load
Growls, snarls, bites - Faye Driscoll tries a little cat fight Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, May 8, 2007
Wow Mom, Wow is a palindrome whichever way you read it. Flipped head over heels, the title of Faye Driscoll’s latest piece could be words exclaimed by a pleasantly shocked daughter: “Mom? Wow, Mom!” And any mom attending this funny, impudent feminist circus of a dance better be pretty cool, because these grrrls are channeling their inner wild animals. The beginning is a stunner. The doors of two dressing rooms stage right open, and as the light inside streams into the dark studio theater, 10 women pad out on all fours and arrange themselves in a line, butts to us. The doors swing shut behind them. As Amanda K. Ringger brings up the lights, Katy Pyle emerges from a third room and, like a hostess who hasn’t expected this many guests, greets us extra-enthusiastically, complimenting various spectators on their attire or good looks. As she moves along the line of women whose faces we’ve yet to see, she names them, assuring us how happy every one of them is that we’re here. Each performer emphasizes Pyle’s words by a little wriggle of pleasure or a more exuberant jabber of butt and legs. The women aren’t faceless for long. Dressed in sporty gray stretch-jersey outfits with touches of color, they rise to seethe and vibrate with repressed rage. They growl, wag their tongues, and claw in our direction. They hunker down and grunt as if trying to shit out weeks of constipated rage. But their catfights end in nuzzling and grooming, and they periodically crawl docilely back to the dressing rooms. In one corny lineup, they offer occasionally treacly optimism, like “I am at peace with the universe.” Confidence vies with insecurity, and awkwardness with expertise. Holding a mirror, Pyle riffs brilliantly off the line, “Is it really a person standing in front of you?” The roughhouse sensuality of a duet between Lily Baldwin and Noopur Singha is interrupted by Pyle asking mildly, “What are you doing?” The others cluster and babble the question endlessly while Baldwin says—and finally yells —”I don’t know!” Pyle, Baldwin, and Toni Melaas grapple with raw vigor, but in ensemble passages— to an array of raucous recorded music by, among others, Four Tet, Dynasty Handbag, and Rod Stewart—Driscoll deploys loose-flung gestures and vigorous stomping into contrapuntal patterns as neat as any ballet choreographer’s. Wow Mom, Wow may go over the top at times, but how could you not love women who scream into pink hairbrushes and say things like “I wish I could give birth to a cat”?
Age? 32 What do you do? I’m a choreographer: my works are full of awkwardness, dichotomy, androgyny, pop music and raw physical dance. Zodiac sign? Sagittarius, with Leo rising and Cancer moon. In which borough of New York do you live? Brooklyn. What is so NYC about you? Like New york, I am busy, stimulating, dirty and overcrowded. Also I get a strange joy from giving tourists directions. If you didn’t live in NYC, where would you? My original home: Californ-I-A. Biggest love about NY? New York is an amazing animal that, daily, mirrors back to you your own mental state. It looks incredible and full of potential one minute, and then hideous and cruel the next. But it’s all here. You can be whatever you want... except a slow walker. You might get beaten up for that. What sucks the most? Working too much, not seeing friends enough, still being poor and having to pay people to teach you how to relax. If you were a Big Apple? I wouldn’t be able to speak the human language but I’d be saying grrfgrrrfrummfffgrrrly in apple language which translated - is a kind of perverted curse word that induces salvation in humans. Do you shave, wax, laser or let it all hang out? All of the above: preferably at the same time. And in public. What’s your favorite hairstyle? Too-much-sex dreadlocks. Who cuts your hair? The lovely and talented Katy Pyle. Who’s your hair hero? Jennifer Miller, the bearded lady. She’s so cool. What was your best/worst hair moment? In my early 20’s, I cut my hair in a fit of break-up rage; my eyes were closed most of the time and I used these big, dull scissors. I ended up with a lot of ugly bald spots. The funny part was that, in the weeks after that fitful cut, I had several people approach me to find out who cut my hair.
