Being There

“Thank You for Coming – Attendance”
Faye Driscoll
COIL Festival
Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church
New York City
January 8, 2015

by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2015 by Martha Sherman

Faye Driscoll's "Thank You for Coming - Attendance," actually suggested more a condition of entry than a polite rejoinder after the fact. Co-commissioned by Danspace Project and LMCC and presented as part of the COIL Festival, "Thank You for Coming" invited the audience to become entwined in the shifting scenes as cast assistants, scenery decoration, crew, and -- finally -- as dancers themselves.

All the while, the dancers were entwined in a pattern of five that was always just short of falling apart. When this group connected in their ménage-a-cinq, it was with pulls, tugs, and pinches, their body weight hooked into the creases of each others’ limbs. Like a human Rube Goldberg contraption, it was never quite clear whether they would hold up – but, somehow, they managed.

L to R, clockwise: Alicia Ochs, Brandon Washington, Giulia Carotenuto, Nikki Zialcita, Sean Donovan in “Thank You for Coming- Attendance.” Photo © Maria Baranova.

The audience was seated on the floor and arrayed on low risers around a raised platform in the center of the floor. After the dancers had moved in and out of several patterns in the five-some, Driscoll entered the space, climbed underneath the central platform, and disassembled it as the dancers danced, unhooking the low benches that were connected to create the performing space.

The dancers, meanwhile, slid to the center of the platform (the last section to be taken apart), their bodies in one long line, each stretching long and holding the feet of the next dancer. They didn’t fit onto the stage, and spilled out over the edge, into the laps of audience members sitting on the floor. The dancers rolled over people’s laps, asking for help undressing and changing costumes on the floor; all the while, they also were successful distractions as Driscoll radically changed the performing space, which was now a floor surrounded by benches.

It was this, the intercon- nection of the dancers and the audience, which centered the rest of the performance. Most of the score, played and sung live by Michael Kiley, was assembled from the names of everyone in the room – collected on entry, as the audience members checked into the show. Dancing in mixed couples and a group, the performers moved, robot-like, in fits and starts, repeating some of the sung names like a chorus to  Kiley’s song. Props were distributed around the room – scarves, bright gold shower caps, small flower bouquets – and each section in the audience became part of the visual landscape, and were called upon to wave or hold up their props or ribbons for the maypole dance.

The dancers occasionally melded into a sharp parallel troupe, moving toward each wall of the room, toward and away from the continually shifting audience. Their costumes morphed, too, as the lights became dark and shadowed. Dancers and crew (including Driscoll) crawled diagonally across the floor, their stretchy pants pulled behind (and sometimes over their heads) into taught, long ropes.

The stretched fabric became the cross-pieces of an overhead grid that included ropes and audience-held ribbons, and created a enormous maypole-like lattice, without the central pole. In a simple circle dance, the performers ran, skipped, hopped to the center – and invited the audience to join them, a few at a time. The circle grew larger, as Driscoll made everyone part of her dance. In fact, she suggested, it was the audience who played the central character in her quirky, engaging work.

From left, clockwise: Alicia Ochs, Sean Donovan, Giulia Carotenuto, Brandon Washington, Nikki Zialcita (facing front) in “Thank You for Coming- Attendance.” Photo © Maria Barano

copyright © 2015 by Martha Sherman