(Los
Angeles, CA) – Faye Driscoll is an energetic, voraciously curious, genre
bending dance-theater maker who is changing the landscape of concert
dance. Though she has only been making
original work since 2005, this seasoned New York-based dancer and Los Angeles
native has already been identified as “one of 25 to watch out for” by Dance Magazine, and was awarded a New
York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for her autobiographical work “837 Venice
Boulevard”. She was the perfect person,
therefore, to launch the Residency Program for Movement (RPM), a new initiative
by the in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance designed to bring outstanding
young choreographers to UCLA and Los Angeles.
Under
the leadership of renowned choreographer and WACDance professor Victoria Marks,
the pilot venture of the residency initiative took place from April 23-May 5,
2012.
Following
two master classes for area high school dance students and a spectacular
performance of Driscoll’s newest work “You’re Me” at WACDance’s own
state-of-the-art Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater (April 26 and 27), I joined a
dozen grad and undergrad students from WACDance and Theatre, Film and
Television for a six day intensive workshop on Driscoll’s choreographic
process.
“You’re
Me” is a duet performed by Driscoll and dancer Jesse Zaritt that (in the words
of the choreographer) “probes and
obfuscates the inescapable nature of relationships as the contemporary,
archetypal, fantastical and personal crash into each other, bending and warping
in one shrug, quarrel, or reframing of a scene…. Sliding from the everyday to
the uncanny and bizarre, Driscoll’s choreography poses questions about the
slippery nature of self and other.”
In
the dance, Driscoll and Zaritt play a game of identity dress-up, putting on and
shedding one iconic image after another, with and without the aid of props such
as wigs, fake beards, bras, and the like.
In the opening image, the two stand as living statues in a messily
baroque Hieronymus Bosch-esque tableau vivant, swathed from head to toe in
lengths of bright fabric, clutching fruit, feathers, and fake silicone
breasts. As the audience takes their
seats, the dancers begin glacially shedding their props. A dancer shrugs and a string of pearls hits
the empty stage floor, followed by an orange.
Once they’ve discarded their vestements, Driscoll and Zaritt begin a
shape-shifting game of gender play, evoking classical painting and MTV, voguing
and National Geographic. At times
tender, at times antagonistic, they feed one another, preen and mug for the
audience, present one another, and practice (usually unsuccessfully) being
romantic. The piece is an exhausting and
captivating 90-minute spectacle that ends with a sweat- and body paint-drenched
Driscoll staring at the audience as if asking for approval.
Staring
back at her, and at Zaritt in the background miming for us to applaud for her,
I became aware of the voraciousness of my gaze, the imperative for me to
confirm or affirm the offering of the dancers, to answer the question Driscoll
and Zaritt seem to ask us again and again: “Am I getting it right?”
In the dance studio, our
exploration begins with sourcing movement from imagery, and vice versa. Faye invites us to explore physical states
through memory and fantasy. Day one starts
with embodiment of gendered and non-gendered identities. The premise of these exercises is that images
of “Man” and “Woman” live in our bodies, sourced from popular culture, myth and
memory. They live in the form of
stereotype, taboo, cliché, and archetype.
They have shapes, postures, ways of moving, and they make sounds and
sometimes form words.
In a linear pathway, we
move across the floor in groups of three, embodying “Man”, then “Woman”, then
“Creature”. As “Creature” we morph from
one chimera to another, imagining bizarre, never-before-identified bodies
growing inside our own and breaking out.
We explode with sound and energy. Faye tells us to tune in to the
feeling of the movement, the vibrations.
She tells us to “perform”—and performance gives us a particular energy
and focus that she calls “alchemy”. Then
she tells us to break out of our lines and fill the space, performing “Self,
Ungendered”, that is, if You were never assigned a gender, how that You moves,
sounds, and vibrates.
We play with the collective
creation of narrative, and by narrative, Faye is talking more about
relationship than story. Meaning emerges
from movement, from accidental relationships, from liveness and responsiveness
within the group. Narrative is a product
of collective creation, and it is never fixed.
Borrowing from various modalities including Authentic Movement, we
practice seeing each other and being seen.
We practice witnessing and re-performing each other’s dances. We make note of changes and shifts in
meaning, relationship, tension, release, and tone as we discover, perform, and
re-perform sequences of movement.
“I’m interested in
challenging the idea of one essential self… the stories I tell myself in the
morning to keep up with that narrative,” Faye tells us as we sit in a circle
digesting the exercises. She speaks
frequently of fantasy and the surprising emergence of associational meaning and
non-linear narrative that comes from movement.
How do we recognize that these ideas of gendered bodies, gender
representation, and the relationships between gendered bodies live in us,
without reifying them? How do we keep a
critical perspective?
As we practice
intersubjectivity, we open our bodies to become conduits of cultural
information as well as creators of new possibilities of relationship and
meaning. In our bodies gendered identities
lose some of their fixedness. We play,
we laugh, we become our mothers, our demons, our child selves. And as students of choreography and
performance, we get to live for a few days in the fantastical world of Faye
Driscoll’s process, learning from the inside out.
Allison Wyper (MFA Dance, 2011) is an
interdisciplinary performance artist and assistant producer of the 2012
Residency Program for Movement at the Department of World Arts and
Cultures/Dance.
Photo: Faye Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt performed "You're Me" at UCLA's intimate Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater. Photos by Lilian Wu.
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