New York Live Arts presents Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist Faye Driscoll's "Weathering"
Company:
Faye Driscoll
NEW YORK LIVE ARTS PRESENTS WORLD PREMIERE OF RANDEJELOVIĆ/STRYKER RESIDENT COMMISSIONED ARTIST FAYE DRISCOLL’S WEATHERING
FEATURING SOUND AND MUSICAL COLLABORATION WITH SOPHIA BROUS
APRIL 6-8, 7:30PM & APRIL 13-15, 7:30PM
“Ms. Driscoll is fascinating in that she makes such utterly original work. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before, nor can you imagine thinking it up.” — Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times
New York, NY (March 29, 2023) - New York Live Arts’ (Live Arts) Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA) Program presents the world premiere of Weathering, a new multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects, by distinctive performance maker Faye Driscoll. The tableau vivant will be presented at New York Live Arts Theater (219 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011) from Thursday, April 6th through Saturday, April 8th at 7:30pm, and Thursday, April 13th through Saturday, April 15th at 7:30pm. Tickets start at $25 and can be purchased at NewYorkLiveArts.org or 212-691-6500, on sale now.
In Weathering, ten performers consisting of dancers, singers, and production crew glacially morph moment to moment on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen and cleave, in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the central, spiraling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking, choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from what was just below the surface to the immediately, alarmingly, perceivable.
Sound and Music Director, Sophia Brous is an interdisciplinary artist and performer based in New York and Melbourne, Australia. A musician, singer, performance-maker, devising artist and curator, Brous’ practice draws on far-reaching interests in devised performance and collaboration. For Weathering, Brous and Driscoll develop a nuanced chorus of breaths into waves of sound, vacillating between hum, harmony, and horror. The vocal score emerges within a subtly building landscape of contact microphones, electroacoustic sound design, field recordings, feedback and electronic synthesis, gradually exploring the grey area between the organic and industrialised world. The piece is performed by James Barrett, Kara Brody, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Amy Gernux, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jennifer Nugent, Cory Seals, Eliza Tappan, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, and Jo Warren. Scenic Design is by Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan; Lighting Design by Amanda K. Ringger; Live Sound and Sound Design by Ryan Gamblin; Composition, Field recordings, and Sound Design by Guillaume Malaret; Costume Design by Karen Boyer; and Dramaturgy by Dages Juvelier Keates.
“It has been absolutely rewarding to witness the development of Weathering over the last two years and to be able to provide support, care and crucial resources — financial, administrative, producorial, managerial — that allow Faye to dream, experiment and realize this exhilarating and profound new work,” share Live Arts artistic leadership Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong. Weathering is commissioned, produced and presented by New York Live Arts as part of the Randjelović /Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist Program (RCA), with lead support from the Mellon Foundation. The program is by-invitation only and offers two years of salary, healthcare benefits, full-time access to dedicated office space during the entire residency period, creative funds, a technical theater residency and fully-produced production.
Weathering is commissioned and produced by New York Live Arts as part of the New York Live Arts Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist Program and co-commissioned by Theater der Welt 2023 in Frankfurt – Offenbach, Carolina Performing Arts at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dancers’ Workshop in Jackson Hole, WY, The Joyce Theater Foundation’s Artist Residency Center, made possible by lead funding from the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional commissioning support provided by Wexner Center for the Arts and members of Faye Driscoll’s Commissioners Circle.
Weathering is made possible with generous support from New York State Council on the Arts, Café Royal Cultural Foundation and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and developed with residency support from, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, Pillow Lab at Jacob’s Pillow, and Dancers’ Workshop.
The Live Arts 2022-2023 season presents artists and thought leaders who participate courageously in the world of ideas and ask difficult questions. Forwarding a vision to be a conduit for engagement through the arts and body-based investigation, Live Arts prioritizes creating communities, confluences, and platforms for the exchange of ideas. Ticket pricing is on a variable scale, with a minimum of $15 made possible by Con-Edison. Live Arts offers a standard ticket price, as well as options to pay more or less.
ABOUT
FAYE DRISCOLL
Faye Driscoll 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 was the 2021-2022 Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Bessie award and the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award among many others. Her work has been presented at Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, ICA/Boston, MCA Chicago and BAM, and internationally at Tanz im August, 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. She recently premiered Calving (2022) at Theater Bremen (Bremen, Germany). In 2020, her first-ever solo exhibition, Come On In, opened at Walker Art Center and then went on to Portland Institute for Contemporary Art ,On the Boards, and Esplanade in Singapore, offering gallery-goers an experience of six distinct audio-guided experiences called Guided Choreographies for the Living and the Dead.
SOPHIA BROUS
Sophia Brous is an interdisciplinary artist and performer based in New York and Melbourne, Australia. Her practice draws on far-reaching interests in devised performance and collaboration. A musician, performance-maker, devising artist and curator, she creates new contemporary performance working with artists, festivals, concert houses and major events internationally. Brous is a resident artist of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) New York, and former artist-in-resident of National Sawdust, The Watermill Center and Red Bull Studios New York. She was finalist of the 2019 Melbourne Prize for Music, and former Curator at Large of Brooklyn arts institution Pioneer Works New York, and ongoing Artistic Associate of the Arts Centre Melbourne, where she created Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic in 2015. Between 2021-22, Brous premiered two major new commissioned works internationally – a large-scale performance work for public space ‘The Invisible Opera’ (for Singapore International Festival, RISING, Brooklyn Academy of Music)) and ‘Mount Analogue – A Provisionally Utopian Live Performance Event’ (world premiere, Oslo Opera House Sept 2022). As a performer and vocalist, Brous has appeared in productions for The Barbican London, Southbank Center London, BAM, The Kennedy Center, Paris Philharmonie, Pioneer Works, Oslo Opera House, Operadagen Rotterdam, Sydney Opera House, DOCUMENTA, All Tomorrow’s Parties and LongPlay Festival. Noted works include Dream Machine for Red Bull Music Festival/Pioneer Works New York (featuring Iggy Pop, Master Musicians of Jajouka; Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Zeena Parkins, Greg Fox); When The World’s On Fire for The Kennedy Centre Washington (with Marc Ribot); the world premiere of Ursula K Le Guin’s Music and Poetry of the Kesh (with Okwui Okpokwasili); The Arthur Russell Retrospective (BAM); 200 Motels by Frank Zappa with the BBC Concert Orchestra for The Southbank Center; Marina Abramovic’s Private Archaeologies (MONA/Dark MOFO); song cycle Lullaby Movement for Sydney Festival; and the ongoing New York large ensemble collective EXO-TECH – founded in 2016 by Brous and New Zealand pop singer Kimbra, with collaborators including David Byrne, Caroline Polachek, Moses Sumney, Questlove, Yuka Honda, Amir ElSaffer, Tyondai Braxton and many others.
RANDJELOVIĆ/STRYKER RESIDENT COMMISSIONED ARTIST
The RCA award artist receives two years of salary, healthcare benefits, full-time access to dedicated office space during the entire residency period, creative funds, a technical theater residency and fully-produced production. Since the creation of the program in 2011, Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artists have been Yasuko Yokoshi, Kyle Abraham (MacArthur Genius Fellow 2013), Okwui Okpokwasili (MacArthur Genius Fellow 2018), RoseAnne Spradlin, Raja Feather Kelly, Faye Driscoll, and for 2023-2024 Miguel Gutierrez.
NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
We acknowledge that New York Live Arts is located on the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people in New York City. We acknowledge and pay respect to the Lenape people and to all Indigenous people past, present and future, here and everywhere. Led by world-renowned artist Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts produces and presents dance, music and theater performances in its 20,000 square-foot home, including a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square-foot studios. New York Live Arts offers an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people; it supports the continuing professional development of performing artists. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; it is the company’s sole producer, providing support and the environment to originate innovative and challenging new work for the Company and New York’s creative community.
FUNDING
Support for New York Live Arts is provided by the Arnhold Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Ed Bradley Family Foundation, The Brant Foundation, Inc., Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Dance/NYC, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, Alex Katz Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Alice Lawrence Foundation, Mellon Foundation, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts, The One World Fund, The Poss Family Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, The Semel Charitable Foundation, Scherman Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and Tides Foundation.
Corporate support for New York Live Arts includes Con Edison, and Tito’s Handmade Vodka.
Public support for New York Live Arts is from Humanities New York, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council with special thanks to Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Dance/NYC’s New York City Dance Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program, made possible by the Mellon Foundation.
Photo by Maria Baranova
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