The Chocolate Factory Theater Presents PATCH THE SKY WITH 5 COLORED STONES

The Chocolate Factory Theater has announced the world premiere of patch the sky with 5 colored stones, a new work instigated by choreographer, director and performer Daria Faïn with 15 international collaborators which will be released online throughout Fall 2020.

Originally conceived as a solo performance with special appearances by Faïn's long time collaborators (intended to premiere at The Chocolate Factory Theater in September 2020) celebrating her 60th birthday and the culmination of 40 years of research into the body/mind embodiment within architecture, language, spirituality and communal action (drawn from Daria's ongoing work with poet/architect Robert Kocik in the Commons Choir), patch the sky with 5 colored stones will now unfold in two separate but deeply related strands.

The first, a series of original short films adapted from Daria's solo work and collaborative duets with choreographers/performers Melanie Maar and David Thomson - informed by her decades-long investigation into the divine feminine - will be produced at The Chocolate Factory's current and future spaces throughout September.

Concurrently, a 24-hour online gathering hosted via Zoom and collectively authored by the collaborative team (open to the public with a suggested donation, advance registration required) will take place from November 14 at 12:00pm EST to November 15 at 12:00pm EST.

This 24-hour online gathering is not a performance - rather, it is a reflection on not having a performance and what it means to come together artistically, from our respective domestic spaces, without the organizing framework of the "show". Audience members are welcome to "come" and "go" as they please throughout the 24-hour period. Attempting to carve out a soft and contemplative 'time parenthesis' within the framework of our collective digital overload, the collaborative team of Patch the Sky will undertake a durational exercise in free association, emphasizing the casual as a source of creativity as they share fragments of work, materials, recipes, conversations, scores, and the absence of those things - all of it in service to the practice of "not making".

Embracing the uncertainty and dislocation of the global lockdown, in March 2020 Daria and her collaborators - an international group of performers, composers, designers, poets, architects and filmmakers - began to gather weekly for durational rehearsals via Zoom. Originally intended to facilitate remote collaboration with the project's European participants, these meetings gradually became less functional and more experiential as new pathways to collaboration, and a new understanding of the "real", unfolded via the disconnected tools of the internet, at an unprecedented historical moment, while confined to domestic spaces across different cities and time zones - the sensations of "rehearsing" during lockdown becoming the experience of the work itself. The culmination of this months-long exercise in remote collaboration, this 24-hour online gathering will speak to the boundless and all encompassing spaces that can manifest between human beings in the virtual realm.

With imagery, action-based score, sound, language, color, and time, the online iteration of patch the sky with 5 colored stones will dive simultaneously into the respective skills of each participant, freely associating within the specific approach of Chinese 5 Element Theory (and the correspondences between our organs, colors, sound, speech, time of day, emotions and direction in space) to open up a multi-layered contemplation on our collective states of being - which has been the basis of Faïn's work for more than 35 years.

All of these materials - original films, documentation of the communal gathering, and a host of contextual materials - will be made freely available to the public, and archived in perpetuity, within an interactive online platform to be launched on December 7, 2020; inviting the spectator to join in the effort to conjure an experience of human intimacy using tools of disconnection.

patch the sky with 5 colored stones is instigated by Daria Faïn in collaboration with Anaïs Maviel, vocalist/instrumentalist/composer (France / USA), Athena Kokoronis, artist (USA), Christian Konrad Schröder, composer/musician (Austria), David Thomson, performer (USA), Melanie Maar, performer (Austria / USA), Robert Kocik, poet/architect (USA), Saúl Ulerio, performer and performance consultant (USA), Tuçe Yasak, lighting designer (Turkey / USA), Tuomas Laitinen, director/performer (Finland), Alex Romania, director of photography (USA), Alexis Convento, project manager (Germany / USA), Annie Wang, web developer (USA), LD DeArmon, technical director (USA), nb zhong, creative editor (USA), and Shana Crawford, assistant (USA).

patch the sky with 5 colored stones is commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater with support from the Austrian Cultural Forum NYC, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Kone Foundation, Movement Research, and New York State Council on the Arts.

Daria Faïn is a New York choreographer and director originally from the Mediterranean. Her work fuses her European cultural background with three decades of practice in Asian philosophies of the body, American dance training and theater. From this diverse background, Faïn has developed a unique movement and performance approach. She studied the classical Indian dance form Bharatha Natyam for five years in Paris with Amala Devi and in Madras, India with Swarnamuckie (State dancer of Tamil Nadu, 1982). In India she also studied the co-relationship between this classical form of dance and temple architecture. Additionally, she was deeply influenced by her work with the Butoh-based artist Min Tanaka. With a grant from the French Ministry of Culture, she studied at the Graham School in NYC from 1984 to 1986. She has been certified in the Alexander Technique since 1991, and has been an instructor of the Universal Healing Tao (Mantak Chia Chinese Taoist University) since 2001 and studied Martial Arts with Master Allen Frank from 2007-2010. Faïn has extensively researched the reciprocal influence between architecture and human behavior, and has given lectures on Swiss-born architect and urbanist Le Corbusier. Faïn has also studied theater in France with the Roy Hart Theater and the Peter Brook Company. She has conducted extensive research on ancient Greek Theater. Over the years, Faïn's choreographic research has led her to work with people with mental illness, the developmentally disabled, and deaf-blind individuals, leading to a complex understanding of the body as an endless resource of knowledge. In 2006, working collaboratively with poet/architect Robert Kocik, Faïn created the Prosodic Body, a new field of research on the embodiment of language that manifests in performance, education, architecture and writing. In 2008 they founded the performing group The Commons Choir, a core and variable cast of roughly 30 singers, actors, composers and people with which they create highly socially charged performances.

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