The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents award-winning choreographer Faye Driscoll in Thank You For Coming: Attendance on Thursday Oct. 8, Friday, Oct. 9, and Saturday, Oct. 10 at 8:00 p.m., in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the ICA (100 Northern Ave., Boston). General admission tickets are $25, $15 for members and students, and can be purchased at www.icaboston.org or by calling (617) 478-3103.
A song whose sole lyrics are the names of each of the audience members. A stage that becomes the seating. Costumes that become cords connecting audience and dancers. These are just some of the strategies used by Driscoll in Attendance, the first work in Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming trilogy. The performance continues her interest in how people perceive themselves in relationship to others—an idea also expressed in her earlier work You’re Me, performed at the ICA in 2012. Intimately staged in the round, the work creates a heightened reality of observation and interdependence as five performers (along with Driscoll and composer Michael Kiley) morph through physical entanglements and scenes of distorted familiarity with physical rigor and humor. Audience and performers become one as a beautiful shared identity emerges.
The second part of the trilogy: Thank You for Coming: Play (working title) was in development at the ICA this past summer as part of a Summer Stages Dance at ICA choreographic residency. It will be presented at the museum in 2016.
Free preshow talks with David Henry, Director of Performing and Media Arts at the ICA, 30 minutes prior to curtain.
About Faye Driscoll
Faye Driscoll is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer and director who has been hailed as a “startlingly original talent” by the New York Times. Her work is rooted in an obsession with the problem of being ‘somebody’ in a world of other ‘somebodies’ and all of the conflicts and comedy born in our interactions with others. Works include: Wow Mom, Wow a postmodern/pop musical/death metal fantasy (2007); 837 Venice Boulevard (2008; Bessie Award) an autobiographical work taking place in a theater within a home; There Is So Much Mad In Me (2010) an exploration of ecstatic states; You’re Me (2012) a duet distorted by props, paint and manic costume shifts; and she is currently at work on a series called Thank You for Coming that implicates the audience in the work and invites the sensation of co-creation.
This performance is supported, in part, by the David Henry Fund for Performance.
First Republic Bank is proud to sponsor the ICA’s 2015–16 Performance Season.