Thank You For Coming: Space is built to be a rite for the grieving body, the body lost, disoriented, bewildered, broken.

When the pandemic began, all my performances of Space were cancelled.  

In the first month of shutdown I went for a walk and bumped into a friend. We stood far away and awkwardly talked. He casually proclaimed, “The handshake is dead.” 

Shook by his nihilistic erasure of a gesture I thought, “If such a chaste choreography as a handshake is dead, what about my work?” It must be extra dead. Or worse, it must be digital. 

Dries [Douibi] and Daniel [Blanga Gubbay] contacted me several months into the pandemic about creating a Covid version of Space [at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts]. 

In Space I am alone with the audience. Intimate, close, touching. I scream near them, stumble into laps, drag my vibrating body, mouth open, across the ground. I ask, “Will you hold my head?” And people hold it, again and again. The full weight of it. 

Impossible. Over. 

But as an artist I felt the imperative to adapt, to extend my body into this moment where people are dying alone, untouched and upheld. This is not the world I want, but it is the one we have. To hold the tension of intimacy and distance. To try find new mechanisms and prostheses for touch through objects, imagination, sound. To take risk within this extreme constraint. 

And so here I am. Trying to hold, to hold on, to hold space.  

• Faye Driscoll