THANK YOU FOR COMING: SPACE Makes World Premiere at Montclair State University

Peak Performances continues its convention-defying 2018-19 season with a world premiere work from choreographer, performer, and director Faye Driscoll, the season's recipient of Peak's vital PeARL (Performing Arts Research Laboratory) residency. The final installment in Driscoll's three-part Thank You For Coming series, Space is both an intimate shared performance (audience capacity is set at approximately 60) and a liberatory ritual that confronts life's most notable transition. Alone with the audience, Driscoll constructs a temporary world-upheld by pulleys, ropes, and the weightiness of others-to invoke the sensations of absence. At the center of the work is the human body: built for action, self-contained, and driven by its longing for the felt world. Space calls forth new presences and offers an enlivened contemplation of our shared conclusion. Of Driscoll's powerfully inquisitive artistry Peak Performances Executive Director Jedediah Wheeler says: "Faye Driscoll is a game-changer who challenges one's aesthetic equilibrium; she perfectly exemplifies the caliber of adventurous artist that Peak Performances and the PeARL residency seek to support with funding, space, and the expertise of a first-rate production staff."

Space is part of Driscoll's Thank You For Coming series, the first two parts of which (Attendance and Play) were seen together for the first time at Peak Performances this past October. Collectively, the series seeks to extend the sphere of influence of performance, creating a communal space where everything is questioned, heightened, and palpable. According to Driscoll, the trilogy is a "series of works about how we are all wrapped up in each other, whether we like it or not. Each work in the series poses performance as a ritual act in which we sense that we do not exist in a vacuum."

The Thank You For Coming trilogy's two existing iterations have been commissioned and presented nationally and internationally by acclaimed presenters over the past four years, including Brooklyn Academy Of Music, the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project. Thank You for Coming: Space is performed by Faye Driscoll. The creative team includes visual designers Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin, sound designers Andrew Gilbert and Faye Driscoll, lighting designer Amanda K. Ringger, artistic advisors Jesse Zaritt and Sacha Yanow, rehearsal assistant Izzy Miller, and producer and manager George Lugg.

Performances of Thank You for Coming: Space will take place Thursday, April 11 and Friday, April 12 at 7:30pm; Saturday, April 13 at 8pm, and Sunday, April 14 at 3pm at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University (1 Normal Ave, Montclair, NJ). Immediately following the performance on Saturday, April 13, the audience is invited to join the company to share reflections and responses.

Tickets are affordably priced at $30, and can be purchased at www.peakperfs.org or 973.655.5112. Tickets are always free for Montclair State students.

Peak Performances is a program of the Office of Arts + Cultural Programming at Montclair State University and has been honored by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts with an Arts Citation of Excellence and Designation of Major Impact. Programs in this season are made possible in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Thank You for Coming: Space was commissioned by Peak Performances as part of the Performing Arts Residency Lab (PeARL) at Montclair State University, New Jersey; and co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Nadine McGuire Commissioning Fund; and Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University through the Wexner Center Residency Award Program. The work was made possible with generous support from the Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards Program and the Jerome Foundation, and developed with residency support from Camargo Foundation, the Pillow Lab at Jacob's Pillow and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Thank You for Coming: Space is a project of Creative Capital.

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