Faye Driscoll: Chimera

Faye Driscoll brings Chimera to the McGuire Theater at the Walker Art Center from January 21 to 23, 2027. It's a Walker commission, and the title comes from the chimera—a creature made of disparate DNA and biology—which Driscoll uses as a starting point to ask whether the world projects itself back onto us when we project ourselves onto it. The piece is a wordless reflection on the state of the world, the climate, and our place in it, built around choreography, objects, and sound.

Driscoll's work is rooted in choreography and informed by Butoh and performance art. The New York Times has called it "utterly original work" that challenges how we perceive the body, and Chimera fits that description—it's as much about how you're watching as it is about what's happening on stage. It's a wordless piece, so you're left to read the movement and the sound rather than a script.

Chimera is part of the Walker's Out There 2027 series of experimental performances. The series opens with Suzanne Bocanegra's Farmhouse Whorehouse and continues with Philippe Quesne's Le Paradoxe de John and Leslie Cuyjet's For All Your Life. If you're into this kind of work, it's a good excuse to keep an eye on the rest of the season.

Beyond this piece, Driscoll is spending the year in Rome. She and writer-scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris are the 2026-27 Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize Fellows in the Environmental Arts and Humanities at the American Academy in Rome, so Chimera arrives while she's working in that context. The performances run January 21 through 23, with each show starting at 7:30 PM. Tickets start at $25.