Faye Driscoll Stars in THANK YOU FOR COMING: ATTENDANCE Australian Premiere October 2016

Brooklyn-based choreographer and director Faye Driscoll takes audiences on a joyous and intriguingly wild ride in Attendance, the first work from her three-part series Thank You for Coming.

Deceptively chaotic and spontaneous, Driscoll rigorously crafts a heightened exploration of how we experience ourselves in relation to connecting to other bodies, stories and spaces.

"I am obsessed with a basic problem that we all encounter: being "somebody" in a world of other "somebodies." My work attempts to pull apart this daily performance of self. I do this by enacting it in excess, blowing it up to the extreme in order to reveal its edges and create more space, more possibility for who we can be," explains Discoll.

The charged rituals of social engagement are enacted and tweaked to excess by five virtuosic performers, who pass through ever morphing states of physical entanglement and scenes of distorted familiarity, building new bodies, new stories, and new ways of being around a constantly constructed and re-imagined group experience.

Staged in the round, the lines between performer and spectator are softened until they feel their own culpability as co-creators, and disassemblers, of the performance.

As audience and performers increasingly find themselves becoming one, a beautiful and chaotic shared identity emerges, culminating in a dynamic ritual of action and transformation.

A Bessie Award-winning choreographer and director, Driscoll has collaborated and continues to collaborate with theatre and performance artists including Young Jean Lee, Cynthia Hopkins, Taylor Mac, Jennifer Miller and NTUSA.

The presentation of Thank You for Coming: Attendance continues Arts House's ongoing exchange program with New York's Performance Space 122.

Concept & Direction: Faye Driscoll

Choreography: Faye Driscoll in collaboration with the performers

Performers: Giulia Carotenuto, Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Toni Melaas & Brandon Washington

Visual Design: Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin

Sound Design/Original Composition: Michael Kiley

Lighting Design & Production Management: Amanda K Ringger

Tour Manager/Stage Manager: Alessandra Calabi

Artistic Advisor: Jesse Zaritt

Choreographic Assistant: Nadia Tykulsker

Costume Construction & Alteration: Sarah Thea Swafford

For more information about Thank You For Coming: Attendance, visit: http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/arts-and-culture/arts-house/whats-on-arts-house/Pages/thank-you-for-coming-attendance.aspx