“Thank You for Coming: Attendance”
Faye Driscoll
Danspace at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery
New York, NY
March 14, 2014
by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2014 by Martha Sherman
Bessie award winner Faye Driscoll has endless tricks up her sleeve. In her latest, “Thank You for Coming: Attendance,” they eventually involve each member of the audience. The result is a non-stop circus of movement that demolishes the barrier between the performer and the audience using unexpected twists, visual hooks, and a sly sense of humor. Driscoll’s five dancers are woven together themselves in connected patterns, words, and emotions. And Driscoll is right to thank us – as good as the dancers are, this piece isn’t whole without the audience. The performers are the catalysts, but the audience is central to Driscoll’s alchemy, and she manages to transform simple routines into a riot of gold.
“Thank You” stands alone, but is the first in a planned multi-year series of works by Driscoll that she describes as being about an exploration of “the ritual of togetherness.” At the start of this evening’s ritual, our names were taken at the door, our hands were stamped, our coats, bags, and shoes were stored, and we were directed to sit on the floor and steps, around a raised white platform made up of dozens of connected low benches.
After singing a harmonized ditty from the balcony of the church in a tuneful rendition of required theater safety announcements, the five performers - Giulia Carotenuto, Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Brandon Washington, Nikki Zialcita - processed silently onto the platform, and morphed slowly into a tangled, shifting body sculpture. Two dancers pulled in opposite arabesques, counterbalancing the other three dancers in weird off-balance postures. Our view of bodies, as the sculpture changed, depended on where we sat. Sometimes a vantage point offered faces, sometimes crotches or splayed legs pointing toward us, and many shifting, interwoven arms. Each body was partly hidden as it changed position.
At one point, one dancer’s foot balanced on the shoulder of another, his toe dangerously close to the corner of his teammate’s mouth; another was caught in a fellow dancer’s armpit. Eventually, the dancers rolled themselves into a long single braid. As they rolled slowly toward one side of the platform, the braid stretched longer, spilling the tightly wound dancers off opposite edges. Like an overboiling pot, the dance was no longer contained. As the cast continued to roll and stretch, their heads and shoulders slid into the laps of puzzled audience members. Some of the viewers became part of the troupe, as dancers pulled the hapless quasi-volunteers to the floor to tumble along, or rolled over them in the relentless progress across the platform. Finally the braid of dancers slid onto the ground, leaving behind the tourists it had picked up along the way.
The room was transformed as Driscoll, playing stagehand, slid under the dancing platform to disconnect the benches, and the dancers rolled back up to the platform, pulling the white covering from it and wrapping themselves in the cloth stage covering. They rolled back in the opposite direction, pulling the top with them to expose the benches underneath. The audience was displaced, one side at a time. We stood, while the new seating arrangements – the benches of the original platform – were set up by Driscoll and the crew. Meanwhile, the cast distributed odd props around the room – a crowd of gold shower caps, black lace cloths, and bunches of flowers. The audience, befuddled but unresisting, accepted the props, though not without waves of giggles in amusement and awkward uncertainty of what was to come.
Now that the room was festooned with trinkets - the folks wearing gold shower caps were especially eye-catching - the dancers were freed from their human sculpture. They stayed close, though, and their eyes were in constant contact. With jerky movements - like a silent movie, with every other frame deleted - the cast danced to a live soundtrack by sound designer Michael Kiley, who played a thrumming guitar and sang a simple chant – the droning of first names, hundreds of them, including the ones we’d given as we entered.
The scenes changed, using props and audience members, and the dramatic lights (by Amanda K. Ringger) shifted to harsh klieg-like lights that sprayed bright flashes onto the stage; we all squinted with the performers. A bench was pulled toward the center, those sitting on it becoming part of the scenery; several people (both cast and audience) were draped in shawls and threw confetti – a carnival of chaos. Through these seemingly unrelated scenes, the ends of long ribbons that crossed and braided the stage were handed to viewers in every corner of the room. As the lights brightened, the ribbons were raised to the ceiling – and we held the web of a maypole, a tent of ribbon over everyone.
Beneath the ribbon tent, the dancers fell into a folk dance-like pattern, skipping in a circle, hopping to the center. First, the cast danced, then Driscoll joined them, followed by the other stagehands, and the circle grew. Then audience members were pulled in, and more volunteered themselves. The dance grew from five to eight to ten eventually to around fifty, and energetically skipped around in a circle that heaved in and out, to the sounds of drums and low musical tones.
As the drums quieted, the tones lengthened, and the skipping slowed. The expanded circle’s heaving motion turned to a quieter breath. Although the dancers had started the evening in a tight separate group connected only to each other, they had engaged the audience in their embrace. Driscoll had brought us together. The audience, cast, crew, and space connected as the circle breathed in, and out. Finally, the room itself seemed to breathe in deeply – and, as one, we all exhaled.