Thank You for Coming: Attendance and Play

Faye Driscoll is a Bessie Award-winning performance maker who has been called a “startlingly original talent” by The New York Times. Thank You For Coming is the umbrella title for a series of works which Driscoll began creating in 2012 which will culminate in 2020. Each distinct work in the series desires to extend the sphere of influence of performance to create a communal space where the co-emergent social moment is questioned, heightened, and palpable. Driscoll’s work has been presented at venues nationally such as the Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, The Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, MCA/Chicago, Wesleyan University, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, and American Dance Festival, and internationally at the Théâtre de Vanves’ Festival Artdanthé, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and Centro de Arte Experimental (Universidad Nacional de San Martín) in Buenos Aires. Her work was exhibited in Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, and included in NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial, the first biennial at the Museum of Arts and Design. Driscoll has collaborated with theater and performance artists such as Young Jean Lee, Cynthia Hopkins, Taylor Mac, Jennifer Miller, and the National Theater of the United States of America, and recently choreographed for a new film by Josephine Decker. Driscoll has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital award, NEFA National Dance Project award, a Production Residencies for Dance Grant, a French-US Exchange in Dance Grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant. She has also been funded by the MAP Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is a grateful recipient of a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and a 2016 USA Doris Duke Fellowship.

Bobby McElver is a sound designer and composer for theater, dance, and film. He also designs interactive audio-visual technology for bands and live events. Company member of The Wooster Group 2011-2016. The Wooster Group: THE ROOM, EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS, CRY, TROJANS! (TROILUS & CRESSIDA), EARLY PLAYS, VIEUX CARRÉ, and HAMLET. Theater and Dance: Andrew Schneider (YOUARENOWHERE), NYC Players, Half Straddle, Young Jean Lee, Palissimo, Michou Szabo, Erin Markey. Film: Every Secret Thing (Tribeca Film Festival 2014). Nominated for 2015 Bessie for Outstanding Music Composition/Sound Design. bobbymcelver.com.

Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin are Houston-based installation artists whose solo shows include A MARRIAGE: 2 (WEST-ER) at the Invisible Dog Art Center, New York; A MARRIAGE: 1 (SUBURBIA) at HERE Arts Center, New York, and other venues; ArtSlant Prize Presents: Nick & Jake, Chicago; and Preparations for a Marriage at Future Tenant Gallery, Pittsburgh. Their collaborations with choreographers include creating the environments for Yoshiko Chuma’s Shredded and Pavel Zustiak’s S(even). They were twice finalists for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and recipients of grants from The MAP Fund. Vaughan and Margolin are members of the devised theater company TEAM with whom they created the plays RoosevElvis, Waiting for You on the Corner of…, Mission Drift, Architecting, and Particularly in the Heartland that have won numerous awards and toured throughout the world to venues such as The Shed at the National Theater and Barbican Centre, London; Public Theater and PS122, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal; and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. As a scenographer Vaughan has designed over 70 shows for theater, opera, and dance that have been seen throughout the U.S., Canada, the UK, Portugal, Romania, China, Japan, and Oman. While he was the resident designer of Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Festival, Vaughan designed 13 productions including a full cycle of Benjamin Britten’s chamber operas. He frequently collaborates with choreographer Yoshiko Chuma and designed the last two installments of her ongoing Page Out of Order series. For dance company Palissimo, he created sets and costumes for pieces including Le Petit Mort and The Painted Bird Trilogy: Amidst.

Jamie Boyle is a visual artist who mostly works with a needle, thread, and other ordinary objects and who thinks a lot about what that work has to do with the human body. She frequently collaborates on the creation of material stuff for performances and recently worked with artists including Michael Mercil (Thoreau’s Desk, 2017); Ursula Eagly, Martín Lanz Landázuri, and Kohji Setoh (piece with gaps for each other, 2017); Geoff Sobelle (The Object Lesson, 2014/2017); and Ann Hamilton and SITI Company (the theater is a blank page, 2015). Jamie is a 2007 graduate of the Ohio State University MFA in Art program, and she received a majority of her material training while working in Ann Hamilton’s studio from 2007-2011. www.jamieboyleandfriends.com

Amanda K. Ringger has lived in New York since 1997, designing locally, nationally, and internationally with artists such as Faye Driscoll, Doug Elkins, Cynthia Oliver, Molly Poerstel, Jennifer Archibald, Julian Barnett, Nora Chipaumire, Alexandra Beller, Deborah Lohse, Laura Peterson, Donnell Oakley, Kota Yamazaki, 10 Hairy Legs, Darrah Carr, and cakeface, among others. She received a BA from Goucher College in Baltimore and an MFA in lighting design from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of a 2009 Bessie Award for her collaboration on Faye Driscoll’s 837 Venice Boulevard.

Jesse Zaritt is a Brooklyn, NY based dance artist. He is an assistant professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, having previously been the inaugural Research Fellow in the University’s School of Dance. Zaritt has performed his solo work in Uruguay, Russia, Korea, Germany, New York, Japan, Mexico, Israel, and throughout the United States. His solo Binding is the recipient of three 2010 New York Innovative Theater Awards: Outstanding Choreography, Outstanding Solo Performance, and Outstanding Performance Art Production. He has been commissioned to create original choreographic works for numerous American college programs; he has also created choreography for the Seminar HaKibbutzim College (Israel) and the Acco Theater Festival (Israel). He currently dances in the work of Netta Yerushalmy (NYC/since 2009). Zarritt has also performed in the work of Faye Driscoll (NYC/2010-2015) and works as an artistic adviser for her current projects. He has taught at Bard College (NY), the American Dance Festival (NC), Hollins University (VA) and Pomona College (CA), as well as at schools and festivals in Uruguay, Mexico, Japan, Korea, and Russia. Jesse received an MFA in Dance from Hollins University/The American Dance Festival (2008) and a BA from Pomona College (2000).

Amanda K. Davidson is the author of the prose chapbooks Arcanagrams: A Reckoning (Little Red Leaves, 2014), The Space: Fragments for a Family (Belladonna, 2014), and Apprenticeship (New Herring Press, 2013), as well as The Conditions of Our Togetherness, an online serial comic on Weird Sister Magazine. A 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry, she has been a writer-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, I-Park Foundation, Inc., and Art Farm in Nebraska. She teaches writing and movement at Evergreen State College.

Alessandra Calabi is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist hailing from Milan, Italy, who works at the intersection of performance, politics and critical theory. A graduate of the New School for Social Research, she completed her Masters Degree in Philosophy in 2015. Alessandra is the stage manager and co-creator of Andrew Schneider’s Obie-award winning YOUARENOWHERE, and is a main collaborator on AFTER, which premiered in September 2017. She is a member of the collaborative arts group Fixed Agency, Artists-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 2014 and creators of Private(i), an immersive mixed-reality adventure about state surveillance. Alessandra has been touring with Faye Driscoll since 2016, and has worked in the U.S. and around the world for Pascal Rambert, Thaddeus Phillips, R.B. Schlather, Adam Weinert, Banana Bag and Bodice, among others.