Thank You For Coming: Play
2016
“A tour de force of performance and direction.”
— The New York Times
Thank You For Coming is a series of works created between 2012 and 2020 which summons the unnamed forces that surge between the viewer and the viewed.
Thank You For Coming: Play, the second work in the trilogy uses the ritual of storytelling to explore our human reliance on stories to relate to one another and form identities as individuals and citizens. Play focuses on the shadows, gaps, repetitions and stutters between what we say and what we do while we say it. In this strange and enthralling collage of gesture, image, voice, and persona, where the physical and aural exist in a slippery relationship, performers ventriloquize, shape-shift and speak through and for each other. This semi-fictional collective autobiography explores “who we are” as both mythically urgent and elusively empty. How does language at once define and reduce our lived experience? Play lays bare the dichotomous experience of self and the performance of self; of being among and being alone; of communion and alienation. Mouths and bodies say one thing while words say another in a strange and delightful meditation on the social nature and corporeal faltering of language.
Play premiered in September 2016 at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
CREDITS
Performed By: Faye Driscoll, Sean Donovan, Lindsay Head, Paul Singh, Laurel Snyder, Brandon Washington / Original Cast: Alicia ‘ayo’ Ohs
Sound Design: Bobby McElver
Music Direction: Bobby McElver and Sean Donovan
Original Composition: Bobby McElver, Sean Donovan, and Faye Driscoll
Vocal Arrangements: Sean Donovan
Lyrics: Faye Driscoll
Additional Lyrics: Sean Donovan
Visual Design: Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin
Lighting Design: Amanda K. Ringger
Garment and Props Design: Jamie Boyle
Stage Manager: Alessandra Calabi
PRESENTATIONS
Oct 4–7, 2018: Peak Performance’s (Montclair, NJ)
Aug 1–5, 2018: Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (Becket, MA)
Nove 9–12, 2017: MCA Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Oct 19–21, 2017: ICA/Boston (Boston, MA)
Sep 12–14, 2017: PICA/TBA Festival (Portland, OR)
Jun 19–21, 2017: River to River Festival (New York, NY)
Apr 14–15, 2017: Philadelphia FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA)
Jan 12–14, 2017: Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN)
Nov 16–19, 2016: Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY)
Sep 22–25, 2016: Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University (Columbus, OH)
COMMISSIONING & SUPPORT
Commissioned by Wexner Center for the Art, and co-commissioned by BAM, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Walker Art Center; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; and Mass Live Arts. Created with support from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, Jerome Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, MAP Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Residency support was provided by Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, The Museum of Arts and Design, The Performing Garage Presents visiting artist series and chashama.
Thank You For Coming: Play is a project of Creative Capital.