Faye Driscoll Thank You for Coming: Play 

“No to prettiness, no to glamour, no to glistening muscular limbs. Yes to intensity, yes to body heat, yes to wildness, freedom, and in-your-face defiance.”—Dance Magazine

Say “YES!” again to strikingly original dance artist Faye Driscoll, who returns to finalize and premiere the second installment of her Thank You for Coming trilogy. Last spring she invited audiences to have a blast joining in the immersive, uninhibited fun of Thank You for Coming: Attendance. Now you can be among the first to experience Thank You for Coming: Play, which injects fresh ideas about narrative into this series of works designed to celebrate the connectivity of artists and audiences.

Completed here during a multiweek creative residency and as part of her 2016–17 Wexner Center Artist Residency Award, Driscoll’s physically driven new dance-play focuses on rituals of storytelling: how we rely on narrative to both relate to one another and form our own identities. Combining her own life story with those of her collaborators and others, Driscoll’s Play will create a semifictional collective autobiography that is danced, sung, and spoken. As this chain of events unfolds, the work seeks to lay bare the gap between what we say and what we do, as well as our sense of being among and being alone. As Driscoll told the Columbus Dispatch, the goal of this and the other works in the series is “to activate the feeling that we are interdependent. We’re making the world that we all live in. We’re co-creating it…we’re players in it.” Be there to be a part of it all when Faye Driscoll shares Thank You for Coming: Play for the first time with her many Columbus fans.

Please join us for a brief Q&A session with Faye Driscoll following the performances on Thursday, September 22, and Saturday, September 24.

Lead commissioner for Thank You for Coming: Play is the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University through its Wexner Center Artist Residency Award program. Co-commissioning partners are Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); Summer Stages Dance at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Walker Art Center with support from the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as part of LMCC’s Extended Life Dance Development program made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional commissioning support was provided by Mass Live Arts through a multiyear residency and presentation commitment.

The Wexner Center’s presentation of Thank You for Coming: Play was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Faye Driscoll’s residency at the Wexner Center is supported by a National Dance Project Production Residencies for Dance Grant, funded by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.