In Performance: Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Attendance at PS122’s coil COIL Festival (New York)

Wear clean socks to Thank You For Coming: Attendance, because as soon as you enter you’ll be asked to remove your shoes. This is just the first invitation the audience receives to become part of a one-night-only community. Throughout the performance, the audience is encouraged to react, reconfigure, assist, join, and sometimes even replace the performers as they interact with and transform each other and the space. The piece makes the familiar strange (as in repeated slow-motion greetings of old friends) and the strange familiar (as in an infectiously catchy song created from audience members’ names). Danspace Project’s converted church is a fitting venue for a performance that takes on the quality of a ritual, the kind that leaves its participants with a satisfying feeling of being connected to something larger than themselves.

PS 122’s 2015 COIL Festival continues through January 17th.

Created by: Faye Driscoll
In collaboration with the company: Giulia Carotenuto, Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Brandon Washington, and Nikki Zialcita
Visual Design: Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin
Sound Design: Michael Kiley
Lighting Design: Amanda K. Ringger
Artistic Advisor: Jesse Zaritt
Choreographic Assistant: Nadia Tykulsker

A Danspace Project commission reprisal co-presented by Danspace Project, Performance Space 122’s COIL 2015 Festival, and Faye Driscoll Group. Commissioned by Danspace Project and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Write-up by Margo Gray