Faye Driscoll (creator / director) is a Doris Duke Award-winning performance maker who has been hailed as a “startlingly original talent” by The New York Times and “a postmillenium postmodern wild woman” by The Village Voice. 

She is currently the Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Bessie award, among many others. Her credits include collaborations for the Broadway production of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, and Josephine Decker’s award-winning feature film Madeline’s Madeline.

Faye Driscoll’s untitled new work draws upon two prolific choreographies: the acts of battle and sex. Touch—the need for it, our fear of it, the formality of entanglements, the powerful sensations that seem to come through us and take us over—are inquiries for this work. We fight and have sex and love to watch others do these things, at an increasing remove. Why are sex and anger the most repressed states and yet the most rampantly consumed?

Faye is curious about the messy flesh-under-the-fingernails fluid-sharing kind of physical impact, in contrast to, say, the impact of drone strikes or streaming porn. Who or what do we allow to touch us now? Lovers, parents, friends, grocery store clerks, data miners, surveillance systems, facial recognition software? How are we altered? Where is our body, and how far does it extend?

Choreography for her new untitled project will be built with seven performer/singers staging sex and violence, supported by fight choreography and intimacy coordination. How do we, as an ensemble, manage these moments of convergence? Moments where our borders blur, our bodies reach and grope in awkwardness, and our longing moves towards and into each other? The team will research objects used to make sex and violence look “real” in media—merkins, prostheses, yoga balls between bodies, foley—and a non-stop song will be sung throughout the performance, resonating through humans in extreme positions.

Through heightened modes of performativity and reformulations of proximity, the project will call audiences back to the complex ecosystem that is our skin, inviting them to reclaim our undefinable, emergent, unmarketable strangeness

Faye’s work has been presented at Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, ICA/Boston, MCA Chicago and BAM, and internationally at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires.

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

Please visit Faye’s Instagram and her website.