CounterPULSE and Headlands Center for the Arts Present
Faye Driscoll
You’re Me
MAR 7-10, THU-SUN at 8PM
Friday post-show artist talk with Headlands Program Director Brian Karl
Pictured: Faye Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt; Photo: Steven Schreiber
Faye Driscoll’s You’re Me considers how we are constantly made-up and un-done by each other. In this evening-length duet Driscoll probes and obfuscates the inescapable nature of relationship as the contemporary, archetypal, fantastical and personal crash into each other, bending and warping in one shrug, quarrel, or reframing of a scene. Imbued with the adrenaline of potentially dire consequences, You’re Me is a moving portrait of the impossible struggle to unhinge the palindromic loop of self and other. With the constraint of just two performers on stage the whole time, Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt fight a sweaty, evocative, disturbing and deeply funny battle with the dualism they face; male/female, director/performer and performer/audience. They ask: What do you see when you see us on stage? How does our very desire to be more than we are transform us? How do our fantasies of ourselves and of each other create new possibilities for being, and yet give birth to friction, failure, and loss? You’re Me is a kind of tango with chaos and recurrence in which the performers attempt to simultaneously control and destroy the frame through which they are seen – all the while asking, “Am I getting it right?”
You’re Me has been co-commissioned by The Kitchen and The Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio University. You’re Me has been created, in part, through a NEFA National Dance Project production grant which are generously supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. You’re Me has also been created in part, through a Greenwall Foundation Grant, a Jerome Foundation Grant, and has been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council through a residency at Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island, a Maggie Allessee National Center for Choreography fellowship, and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. You’re Me was developed in part at the Key City Public Theater, supported by Westaf’s Tourwest grant funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
About Faye Driscoll
Faye Driscoll is a Bessie-award winning choreographer and director who strives to investigate new forms of theatrical experience aimed to provoke feeling, stimulate the senses and activate the mind. She is interested in expanding ideas of what dance is and creating work that is both entertaining and socially and politically engaged. Driscoll 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 evening-length 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 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 and the ICA/Boston, with upcoming tours to CounterPULSE, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the American Dance Festival, and The Yard. Driscoll’s work deals with the daily narratives of human experience in unpredictable and complex ways. She seeks to unhinge the viewer from their comfort zone in order to unearth parallel possibilities for being. She does this by laying bare the “id” while simultaneously embracing humor, seduction and rigor.