FAWN

Choreographer and filmmaker Charli Brissey directs and performs in this hour-long performance created through interrelated experiments in dance, writing, video, and sound. The choreography includes the design of an original surround sound score which will be experienced “in the round” by audience members.

While the word “fawn” is most commonly used to refer to a baby deer, another meaning of the word describes a trauma response in which someone tries to appease a threat and/or ensure survival through flattery or cringing. The word “fawn” is also commonly confused with “faun,” a human-animal deity and the protagonist of Nijinsky’s famously controversial ballet “Afternoon of a Faun.” This performance weaves these various etymological and mythological lineages of “fawn” and “faun” into an inherently queer dreamscape that asks questions about grief, survival, desire, power, and vulnerability in a precarious ecosystem. The performance blends methods and practices from both autofiction and science fiction, weaving the artists’ lived experiences with speculative experiments in how to hold immense contradictions and overwhelming emotional states in one body.

Direction and Performance: Charli Brissey

Lighting Design: Jess Fialko

Dramaturgical Support: Scott Crandall

Show Duration: 1 hour

Ages: 14+ for language and references to sex/sexuality (please email Y2JyaXNzZXkgfCB1bWljaCAhIGVkdQ== for further details regarding content and age appropriateness)

The Ypsilanti Freighthouse is ADA Accessible

Doors will open at 7:30PM

Parking suggestions can be found

This performance is made possible through generous support from the University of Michigan Arts Research: Incubation and Acceleration Grant (ARIA), the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), the Research, Catalyst, and Innovation Program (RCI), and the Department of Dance.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Charli Brissey (Director, Performer) is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher who works choreographically with various technologies and materials. This primarily includes bodies, cameras, soundwaves, language, genders, desires, instincts, and ecosystems. They make experimental video and performance work that continues to question how to stay alive and present in a world that is wild, unpredictable, and often brutal beyond measure. Most of their projects ask questions about power and the ways in which contradictory emotions and beliefs live individually and collectively alongside one another. Their work has been presented in various galleries, conferences, film festivals, and performance venues nationally and internationally. Their latest films Canis Major and Anything With a Switch have toured to over thirty countries and won multiple awards, including Best Experimental Film at OUTFEST and the Richmond International Film Festival.

Charli is an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Michigan where they have affiliations in the Center for World Performance Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. They teach courses in physical practice, composition, graduate pedagogy, improvisation, dance and technology, and seminars integrating critical theory and art-making.

FAWN follows two decades of Brissey’s research centering choreography and artmaking as critical methods for investigating social, political, and ecological phenomena. They often turn to non-human life—both scientifically and poetically—to complicate the stories we tell ourselves about the boundaries between “nature” and “culture.” The propose instead that what we think of as “nature” and “culture” are always co-producing one another; there is a nature to culture and a culture to nature. Previous projects have included a multi-year science fiction dance project studying the choreography of oceans and benthic ecosystems as radical sites for imagining terrestrial movement patterns (), a study of deep time and eroticism inside of caves (), and ongoing writing and film projects swooning over the generative entangled interdependence of queers and dogs ().

Jess Fialko (Lighting Designer) is a lighting, costume, and scenic designer. Regional credits include: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Theatreworks Colorado Springs, Penobscot Theatre Company, Promethean Theatre Ensemble, Riverside Theatre, Iowa Summer Repertory, Maples Repertory Theatre, Hollins University, University of Northern Iowa, Birmingham Children's Theatre, Davenport Junior Theatre, and Quad Cities Theatre Workshop. Jess is a clinical assistant professor of Theatre & Drama at the University of Michigan, where they teach lighting design and theatre production

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