The renowned performance maker and director Faye Driscoll and her dramaturg Dages Keates visited Bulgaria for the very first time in October 2024 for an artistic residency on the invitation of New Dramaturgies Platform in collaboration with Ivan Vazov National Theater in Sofia, which hosted by the artistic residency. During her stay, the Obie Award winner for 2023 for her performance “Weathering”, who has been described as “a post-millenium postmodern wild woman” by The Village Voice, together with the dramaturg Dages Juvelier Keates, started the research phase of her future project Ghost Light. During their residency Faye and Dages gave a one-day workshop for the Bulgarian community of actors, dancers, choreographers, directors. 

Here is what Faye Driscoll shared in regards to her new project Ghost LIght:

My parents were artists of the hippie generation – loving, permissive, neglectful, often stoned. They rejected their strict catholic upbringings so I wasn’t raised with any religion, but I craved routine and containment and to commune with things larger than me. What I did not find at home I found in dance class – community, devotion, ritual, rules and structure. Everyone even wore the same outfit.

To this day I create rigorous ritualized structures – difficult performances that are teetering on the edge of chaos. My works have often been called “Dionysian”. They are sensual, grotesque, dangerous, ecstatic somatic rites. A Princeton Hodder Fellowship would support the research and development process for my largest scale rite-performance ever – Ghost Light. Ghost Light will be created on the sites the god Dionysus was worshiped, it will think with the rituals that took place there, and will be inspired by the acts that are rumored to be the origins of (western) theater.

In this hyper-mediated time, live art is radical and necessary. Unlike the Agoras of ancient Greece which encouraged gathering and ritual, our contemporary world is full of hostile architecture and online shopping. Gathering is less common, easier to avoid; touch, a litigious and untrustworthy thing. We are lonely, dysregulated, constantly communicating but rarely communing. I believe rites of passage are a kind of circadian rhythm for a life – they remind us we exist and in what time we are living. For me, performance has been a way into creating this rhythm. Ghost Light will be a sculptural, sonic, and multi-sensorial rite made for the masses.

Intimacy, shared risk, and a felt sense of interdependence has been an ethos of my projects – keep the audience close, small, and get them involved. With Ghost Light, I want to extend my reach, scaling my work to massive spaces and larger audiences, with the intention of increased impact. My ideal premier site for this work is the Ancient Theater of Epidaurus in Athens, Greece as part of the Epidaurus Festival.”

At the end of her residency in Sofia, Faye Driscoll carried out a public presentation in the form of a performance-lecture, followed by a talk with Dages Juvelier Keates and her, lead by Mira Todorova. We are sharing some excerpts of the lecture, which offer glimpses into Driscoll’s choreographic view and practice:

“Thinking about this performance-lecture, I asked myself why did I start performing and I know that it is at least in part because I needed attention. We are mostly made of water and minerals and salt and we are these little batteries that are charged up through attention. As a child I wasn’t receiving very much, /../ so I had a bit of a lonely childhood and I found a lot of affirmation and connection and mirroring inside the dance class. And you know in dance class there’s a very clear mirroring going on. There is a teacher that is like the parental figure and you are doing their exact movements back to them. Then there is a big mirror and so you are watching yourself, mirroring yourself back to yourself, regulating and controlling yourself. Then you are in a room with all these other people who are basically dressed exactly like you, mirroring the same thing so it is just this one big mirror practice…

When you go to a performance, everyone’s mirror neurons are really lit up. Enter a stage of a spectacle and you enter a perceptual field. For me this is a field, where the attention is really amplified. And it takes a lot of courage to step onto the stage because I think all of the markers of your identity get really loud. Like your beauty, your ugliness, any part of your body you think is flawed, any way you might be seen or imagine yourself to be seen. And the audience is then there with their heat and their thoughts and feelings, they are listening and they’re judging. The meaning that they’re making is also in the room and I think this is like a field of attention. That is a charge, that’s moving through your whole body and it’s a kind of terror ecstasy, it’s like all the eyes are sunlight that you’re taking into your body and sending back out to the universe. And as a performance maker now I’m interested in this kind of whole swirl of attention and how it can be an elemental force that I stretch, I slow, I sustain, I train, I amplify but far away from the days of sort of training my body to be in control in the mirror. I’m working now with a choreography that is largely based on energetics in vibrations…

Chatting is the experience between audience and performer, the experience of co-creation, the sensation of mutual culpability, so this is something I really am trying to bring out in my works. Chatting by another name is called ‘intra-action’, it’s a term coined by the feminist physicist Karen Barad and it is different from interaction. Interaction proposes two discrete individuals coming together and participating, whereas intra-action proposes us not so much as individuals but as dynamic emergent forces that kind of are working together inseparably. There is a world of mutual constitution of entangled entities, so essentially everything is co-emergent. Basically, the whole world is chatting all the time and mirroring is not a reflection, it’s an action of becoming…

***

Mira Todorova: Reaching back in time to the origins of Western theater and talking about mirroring and being seen, a theory of Hannah Arendt comes to mind – that one only exists in a community, only when you’re being acknowledged, recognized, seen. The very word “theatre” is rooted in the ancient Greek term meaning “to behold”. The root of “theasthai” itself is “thea” which means “a view” or “a seeing.” Hannah Arendt talks about the similarities between theater, ritual and politics – they are about bringing people together to deliberate, discuss exchange about their common living through words and actions. In her perspective theater and politics are very much connected, especially in the ancient times.

Faye Driscoll: We’re really getting thick with that transition from cultic worship of that which was relegated to what Dionis stands for – these forces that come from thieves which in the world of tragedy is the Barbarian Place far away from Athens which is the Appollonia center; this chaotic, wild drunken, orgiastic, mystic death and rebirth site that’s located in the figure of Dionis. And the theory about the emergence of Western Theater which becomes a place in an Amphitheater where you’re looking out towards a civic future, where this idea of a wild path has to be grappled with. And then again the theater becomes this space where signifiers can slip away. I think even in ”Weathering” we see that slide of the sound and the breath and the movement becoming something anarchic, cathartic, where we’re both standing deeply inside and outside of ourselves so it becomes this place of a paradox and of thickening the possibilities of the civic.

Mira Todorova: You talk about ritual and somatic rites in connection to your work. In the ritual somehow people give up their individual will in order to submit to some greater, bigger transcendent entity. Do you think we suffer from a deficit of belief and trust in something bigger than ourselves? A deficit of sacredness? And what art can do about that?

Faye Driscoll: I definitely do. I think we do believe in a lot of things bigger than us, we believe in Google, we believe in Google Earth, we all work for Mark Zuckerberg, we’ve chosen to just give everything over so in a way this is our higher power now. So, if we could make choices around how do we want our higher power and is in any way theater a place where we can play with that or no? Certainly, this is a question I have. I would maybe posit imminence, finding of the sacred and the imminent which has been disavowed in order to become of service to the material.  In these contemporary rituals nothing is pushed away, it is the phone chargers that are part of the ritual, they’re on the altar with the flower and the sensuality, and the festive spirit. I think it’s a proposal of another way of entering into time and space.

Mira Todorova: You say that live art is radical and very necessary today in our hyper-mediated society. In what way do you think people reconnect to the live presence in the arts today especially in the light of the ubiquitous invasion of technologies and AI?

Faye Driscoll: I think in a way there’ll be a greater craving for it as the world becomes more and more mechanized. You can’t talk to anyone at the airport, you can’t talk to anyone in the grocery store, you can’t get a human being on the phone to work out your problem like. As AI is taking over, I hope they’ll be more of a need, this is a big question for me. AI in a sense is a false ancestor, we have this idea that it’s some kind of collective intelligence but of course it’s coming mostly from these large language models, language coming from Wikipedia, generated by white men of a certain age in the Midwest. And it’s also always the past, it’s just a second behind, so it’s an imperfect ancestor, it’s not so intelligent. In a sense the AI just shows us part of the unconscious of the internet, but bodies contain the whole unconscious of humanity and this work is corporeal, it’s not virtual reality, it’s corporal reality and so I think the craving, the urgency for that kind of mirroring, the fleshy mirroring I hope it’s growing in us I feel the desperate need for it.

Mira Todorova: Your last performance “Weathering” was awarded one of the most prestigious awards, the Obie award for directing in 2023. It is an amazing piece, described as a multi-sensory performance, conceived as a moving human sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids, and objects. Tell us more about the idea behind the performance which I had the enormous pleasure of seeing live.

Faye Driscoll: In the piece Weathering there are 10 performers on a very small squishy, unstable platform. At the beginning they have a lot of clothing and bags, they’re like people on the subway or something like a crowd. Slowly by the end various objects have emerged – cords for a telephone and food, different herbs, and smells so it’s very multi-sensorial, all the senses are engaged. I call it a multi-sensorial flesh sculpture. It has an insane amount of detail. It works with intentions and philosophies that I have been exploiting for years and Weathering kind of accumulated many of those processes and practices in work with image, with objects, with presence and energy and the audience being really close and feeling the wind of it. The 10 performers are kind of falling, grasping, collapsing, reaching into each other, engaging in touch that is intimate and soft, and also violent. There is something ambiguous in the sensation of touch, as it is actually quite difficult to define it scientifically, because it’s one of the most multi-sensorial senses. There is not one site of input but there are multiple interactions coming together to create what we are calling touch, so there’s this thing called cutaneous touch, which is mainly from the skin. And there are all these sensors for different inputs: pressure, pain, temperature, itch, pleasure, shape, vibration. The skin itself is not a sensory organ but it contains many different sensory systems. /…/ I can see you without you seeing me you; you could hear me without me hearing you; I might be able to sniff and taste you without you sniffing and tasting me; but it would be almost impossible for me to touch you without you also touching me. And so, for me this unstable situation, this intra action where we’re both agentic and non- agentic, where we find our actions ourselves and our actions are difficult to distinguish between, the selves and the actions of others – this is what Erin Manning calls ‘the politics of touch’ – so this state, this situation, is what I aim to make helpable in the rooms, in my work. I think that maybe as I go on long walks, kind of getting in touch with myself, what I’m actually doing is moving through the world, that is, I’m touching the world as I move through it and the world’s touching me.

Faye Driscoll (USA) is a performer, choreographer and director. The New York Times calls her “startlingly original talent” and The Village Voice described her as “a post-millenium postmodern wild woman”. She has been awarded with many important dance awards, including “Obie” and “GRAND PRIX de la danse de Montreal” for her latest piece Weathering (2023). Faye is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and of other leading artistic institutions. Her work has been presented at Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, ICA/Boston, MCA Chicago, and BAM, and internationally at Tanz im August, Kunstenfestivaldesarts (2021, 2024), La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne à Paris (2015, 2023), Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires, Festival Dias da Dança in Porto, Théâtre Garonne (Toulouse), Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), and Festival TransAmeriques (Montreal), etc.

Dages Juvelier Keates (USA/Sweden) is an artist working with and through the materiality of body as a somatic space for holding paradox. Her works explore performative and poetic methodologies in researching internal cartographies of somatic, psychoanalytic, and nonhuman knowledge. Dages’s pedagogy and praxis center a queer, intersectional, feminist study of the subjective body as an accumulation of unanswered questions; a carnal, poetic, ephemeral archive entangled within and between “others.” Her transdisciplinary work spans performance, dramaturgy, writing and pedagogy. Since 2011, her syncretic teaching style has been profoundly impacted by immersion in studies with their mentor Nevine Michaan, founder of Katonah Yoga. Dages has taught retreats and trainings globally. In 2018, she released her first book, “Radical Acts of Embodiment: Teaching and Practices of Katonah Yoga.”

Ina Doublekova and Mira Todorova worked on the material.

The project was realized with the support of GPS/Global Practice Sharing programme of Movement Research, New York, with the financial support of Trust for Mutual Understanding.