Splitting time between Los Angeles and New York, choreographer Faye Driscoll developed a practice that draws bodies, materials, and spectators into unstable constellations. She approaches malleability as a condition shaped by pressure, care, and exposure. Bodies lean, collapse, support, and absorb, with collectivity continuously formed and deformed. Her work insists on a tactile, often sensorial, approach to materials—their memory, smell, drip, leakiness, weight, impression, grotesqueness, and association.

In Thank You for Coming: Space (presented at the festival in 2021), pulleys release sandbags that strike the floor and a heavy block of clay is slammed down. In Weathering (2024), the group becomes a living mass, sculpted in real time by affect and impact, held together by desire as much as by friction. Driscoll’s practice enters a lineage of dance and performance that explores plasticity in depth—Simone Forti’s attentiveness to weight and task; Cassils’s repeated punching of clay as an index of force, time, and transformation. In this year’s Free School on malleability, Driscoll leads a three-day dance workshop in which participants work closely—often in pairs—to explore how movement emerges through contact, material encounter, longing, absence, intimacy, and negotiation.