The Stakes of Contact: Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Space and Come On In
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The Stakes of Contact: Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Space & Come On In

Faye Driscoll, Thank You For Coming: Space, rehearsal in the McGuire Theater, March 4, 2020. Photo: Pierre Ware for Walker Art Center.

This essay is part of an ongoing series focused on interdisciplinary art practices at the Walker Art Center or in our archives. Funded through a multiyear Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant that aims to explore interdisciplinary art, the series invites scholars, curators, and artists to examine key moments from the center’s past. While these essays help shed light on our history, they also draw upon curatorial and artistic strategies from the past as a means of informing our future.
Choreographer Faye Driscoll’s performance, Thank You For Coming: Space, begins with a quiet crowd. Paper clippings, layered over one another and clustered tightly on the walls and floor of a darkened hallway, display images of dead and dying bodies. Blurry black-and-white wartime photos overlap with medieval-looking scenes of martyrdom. They are a quiet crowd, but so are we: spectators, hushed in the dim passageway, tiptoeing into the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater, where we’ll take our seats for the third and final performance piece in Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming series. All three performance works—Thank You For Coming: Attendance (2014); and 2016’s Thank You For Coming: Play—have been presented at the Walker (both Play and Space were also co-commissioned by the Walker). Prior to COVID-19, the Walker housed a coda to the series, the participatory installation Faye Driscoll: Come On In, part of which is captured in a new online experience.

A year ago, on first encounter with Space, I understood that entryway collage as an invitation to survey Driscoll’s artistic research, images that had shaped the choreographic forms and emotional architecture for her solo piece. (It was April 2019, and Space was premiering at Montclair State University as part of the Peak Performances series.) This assumption made sense then, as did my understanding of the performance as an account of emptiness, a confrontation with the formal and emotional dimensions of negative space. It is, after all, a solo performance that followed two large ensemble works (Attendance and Play), staged in a sparse white cube. It depicts death as a physical process and holds personal grief very close to the surface, motivating the piece if not encompassing its full imaginative scope.

Faye Driscoll, Thank You For Coming: Space. Montclair State University’s Peak Performances at Alexander Kasser Theater, 2019. Photo: Maria Baranova.

These elements contributed to my sense that the piece was a diagnosis of emptiness, though not always a despairing one. But this year, my understanding changed. Already strange and intelligent and generous, Thank You For Coming: Space became more complicated, less a depiction of negative space than a negotiation between absence and the possibility of filling it. And that visual research, I realized, is as much for spectators as it is for Driscoll.

In Space, two rows of audience line the four sides of a white square. This is inherently a spatial negotiation, because Driscoll’s spare playing space, a recognizable emblem of the visual art world’s terms of display, is installed on the stage of a conventional theater, at the bottom of its steeply banked rows of empty auditorium seats. The space is also an expansion of the white square featured in Thank You For Coming: Play, and it presages the gallery space holding the installation upstairs. A system of pulleys traces clean geometric lines above our heads, and dangling from ropes are small sandbags and other props: a lemon, a sheaf of branches. (Artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin created the visual design for Space in dialogue with Driscoll; they also designed the previous Thank You For Coming pieces, as well as Come On In.)

The beginning of Space is a secular call-and-response rite, a conjuring of sorts. Driscoll howls and roars into hanging mics, making low rumbly sounds. A loop pedal amplifies and repeats. Working her way around the room, she requests audience assistance creating rhythms, holding props, and ultimately holding her. “Will you hold my hand?” Driscoll asks individual spectators, adding: “Will you squeeze?” Audience participation is, by necessity or intention, a meditation on consent, which Driscoll models expertly. And spectators almost always say yes. (It’s hard to justify refusing, she pointed out during a Q&A session, because it’s so clear how hard she’s working and how little she’s asking of us.)

These participatory elements represent an evolution of how audience participation has worked across the multipart Thank You For Coming series. Part One, Attendance (which I saw at New York’s Danspace in 2015), presented itself as a ritual of human contact and joy. At the box office, spectators’ first names were recorded on a list—a formality that was later revealed as dramaturgical necessity when members of the cast joyfully sung out our names one by one, stringing a roll-call together into a song. Naming each spectator in turn offered us recognition as individuals, gently balancing the exuberant maypole dance in which audience members are invited to take part collectively. I left the theater ambivalent: was the joyful dance an invitation to join a real (if temporary) community, or the request that spectators simply portray one? And (more likely) was this concern itself an expression of my own obsessive search for anxiety-producing politics in every artistic gesture, a need to categorize everything as critique or as a gateway to quasi-fascist communal ecstasy?

Over tea at the Walker this March, Driscoll reminded me of the limits of this kind of binary, one that has long shaped scholars’ and critics’ implicit responses to audience participation. Driscoll presumes the kind of “emancipated spectator” proposed by Jacques Rancière—an audience member for whom thinking is action and watching doesn’t mean passivity.1 But she also wants to know what remains possible for collectives and whether audience members can think with our bodies, too. In Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship—published in 2012 and still the landmark contemporary guide to considerations of audience activations in art—Claire Bishop argues (drawing on Lacan, which I won’t) that “the most urgent forms of artistic practice today stem from a necessity to rethink the connections between the individual and collective along [these] lines of painful pleasure—rather than conforming to a self-suppressing sense of social obligation.”2 Driscoll’s work does this with candid generosity. What artistic invitation—she wonders aloud—motivates an audience member to simply go from sitting to standing? What provocation is enough to make us put our bodies on the line, even in the safety of an experimental performance and under cover of a crowd?

Driscoll issues such invitations by depicting, embracing, and opening space for emotional multiplicity. In Bishop’s critique of the sometimes narrow, often primarily ethical terms by which participatory art has been understood, she cites the importance of creating space for “perversity, paradox, and negation” in participatory art, which are “operations as crucial to aesthesis as dissensus is to the political.”3 Driscoll observes that the urgency of practicing progressive politics in a reactionary time can make it seem suspect to elevate feeling to the level of thinking, and can make it seem implicitly conservative not to lead with critique. Her approach welcomes and respects emotion, without losing its formal rigor.

Driscoll came of age in a 1990s dance world still in thrall to the inheritances of Judson Dance, particularly as guided by Yvonne Rainer’s famous “NO Manifesto”: a preference for quotidian and task-based movement and for the dancer’s face to express neutral observation, not urgent feeling. Driscoll wanted to use emotion, too, to wield feeling as a formal element alongside gesture and line and sound, and she was intrigued by the invocations of spirituality and the depictions of extremis she saw in the work of downtown theater-makers like Richard Foreman.4 This mingling set of influences may be why Driscoll is one of the few contemporary artists who effectively place artistic disciplines in conversation—drawing on theater, dance, and installation art without using any of them to critique the others.

Driscoll offers abstraction in abundance but never preaches it, layering formal imagery with recognizable gesture. In Space, sandbags held on pulleys pound into the floor, sometimes guided by spectators. As Driscoll works her way around the room, she gently arranges her head and torso across the hands and laps of consenting audience members—a pose of suffering or of rigor mortis, or maybe both. She turns to a lemon suspended from the pulley system, bites in, scowls. She slams a heavy block of brick-red clay into the floor: a body, a receptacle for grief, or just a dense substance contrasting with the empty air.

About an hour into its eighty-minute run time, Space changes substantially: it appears to explain itself. Driscoll mounts a platform and picks up a series of objects, a shrine to a departed parent. “This is your hairbrush,” she says, then, tugging a tuft of gray fuzz from its bristles, “This is your hair.” Her narrative expands, fantasizing the death of the body as an act of glory, decay as a form of ecstatic release. “This is your blood,” she says, pricking her finger and squeezing a dark droplet out. It’s a blood sacrifice, a secular rite.

Faye Driscoll, Thank You For Coming: Space, rehearsal in the McGuire Theater, March 4, 2020. Photo: Pierre Ware for Walker Art Center.

We are invited but not mandated to read the remainder of the performance through this final act. We are invited to think: oh, this is the key. Oh, she’s telling us what the rest of the performance meant, that she bit that lemon to reverse the sense of numbness created by her mother’s death. That she balanced body-crushing cinderblocks on her torso to show us the weight of loss. But we are also invited to think bigger than biography, that Space uses negative physical space as a way of considering abstract and social absences as well as autobiographical ones. We are invited to notice the absence of the ensembles who performed in Attendance and Play, the empty seats rising above us in the theater.

Similarly, this final segment of the performance trilogy invites us to read the first two through its lens: to think of them as tracking a journey from community to isolation and death. In this moment of fascism and quarantine, it’s hard not to think of those people dancing around the maypole in Attendance as different selves. But performance is also about reiteration: resisting reading the past through the catastrophe of the present, and the installation in the Walker’s gallery offers a lesson in how.

Driscoll’s installation, Faye Driscoll: Come On In, surprised me. I was expecting an exhibition of ephemera from the three Thank You For Coming performance works. Bright stretchy costume pieces from Attendance. Silly wigs from Play. Props, video documentation, posters, as in the case of other recent approaches to addressing performance history in exhibition form (for instance, the Wooster Group’s celebrated 2019–2020 retrospective exhibition at Carriage Trade in New York City). The installation contained none of those things: instead, it was an open gallery, lined with a softly inviting black carpet, awash in ambient noise, with amber light gradually fading up and down. A cluster of white boxes stood scattered through the space. From a distance, the spare white rectangles looked like tombs.

Up close, they’re beds. One is large, low to the ground. A high solitary bunk rises nearby. Each is lined in soft white canvas and fitted with a pair of headphones and a button to play the recording when we’re ready to listen, and participate (on the double bed, two pairs of headphones lie side by side). “Come on in,” Driscoll’s voice instructs through the headphones. She guides the listener as we press our faces into the canvas, stretch our legs. Most of the gestures, much of the text, represent fragments compiled from the three performance works. We extend our hands as if holding Driscoll’s head and shoulders, as in Space. “I’m singing your name,” she says softly, invoking the musical roll-call featured in Attendance. Spectators drift in and out of the gallery; during my time there, I closed my eyes often, then opened them to suddenly see other bodies in the room with me. On next opening my eyes, those beds were empty again.

Come On In is a retrospective in this sense: not a selection of material evidence, but a collection of remembered and reinscribed gestures and words from earlier performances channeled through the spectator’s body. As Driscoll pointed out to me, the installation represents a progression from the beginning of the Thank You For Coming series—Attendance, a ritual crowded with a large ensemble of performers and an active audience—to Space, just Driscoll and her spectators, to Come On In: audience members alone with Driscoll’s voice and our memories.

The day I saw Space and Come On In at the Walker—a Friday in early March—immediately preceded an abrupt end to daily activity for myself and nearly everyone I know and vast numbers of people that I don’t. In the days following my visit to Minneapolis, COVID-19 became the only thing we talked or thought about. Theater seasons abruptly folded, the downtown performance scene evaporated into a cascade of self-isolation, Zoom meetings, and cancelled gigs. The recent experience of any live performance could theoretically provide solace during isolation, but Space—the whole series, really—is more like experiential training in how to inhabit this unbearable new world. The installation’s audio tracks are titled Guided Choreography for the Living and the Dead. It’s not hard to imagine, now that the gallery is indefinitely closed, vanished bodies crowding the space, continuing the choreographic sequences. (Like the end of Space, this essay can be read retrospectively through its topical conclusion—or not.)

It’s not that Driscoll’s series is about isolation or pandemic any more than it’s solely about the death of one particular loved one. But Driscoll does shape a choreography for a moment that demands rethinking the stakes of human contact at both the molecular and the systemic level. In Space, negotiating physical touch with spectators, she begins to show us the what it looks like when human touch evaporates. Asking audience members to squeeze her hands and then let go, she holds her palms and fingers in the precise orientation they had assumed during contact: embodying not just the absence of touch but the precise shape it creates when it disappears.

NOTES

  1. 1 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum, March 2007,accessed 26 March 2020.
  2. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 39.
  3. Ibid., 40.
  4. I’m grateful to Faye Driscoll for offering this context in a follow-up email conversation with me.

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