Fawn by Charli Brissey is a theatre dance performance that explores grief and desire, and how they coexist.
Fawn will be taking place Mar. 14, 2026, at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse. Tickets for the event are free but donations are encouraged.
Charli Brissey is an artist, writer, dancer and an associate professor of dance at the University of Michigan.
Fawn is about all of the different contexts in which deer show up in everyday life. The show is about fawning as a trauma response, and fauns, the mythological half-human and half-goat creature.
“I tend to do a lot of things that involve non-humans: ecosystems, environmental stuff, thinking about power and culture in different contexts. I’ve been working on the show 'Fawn' for a couple years, noticing the different contexts in which the deer or something around deer keep coming up, and there are so many different contexts and different ways that that's been happening,” Brissey said. “I just kind of kept encountering deer in these different contexts and wanted to start making them all together in some capacity.”
Brissey has encountered deer and deer themes throughout their life.
“So part of growing up in a conservative hunting town, and my relationship with hunting culture which was both very weird and scary, and very intimate and nurturing about the way certain people would go about the practice of hunting and being very connected to the natural world and learning about different trauma responses and learning about fawning as a trauma response and that whimsical way that show up in different folklores and histories,” Brissey said.
There will be many visual references to deer in the set design and costumes, as well as deer antlers and other elements on stage. There will be forest imagery, costuming and sounds.
There will be a lot of deer-like movement, Brissey said. “I have researched, probably way longer than I need to, just like deer movement. I took a deer biology class, so how deer see, how they move, how they walk, how they listen, what they do when they get scared, what they do when they get excited.”
The show is inspired by the ballet and orchestra piece "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun."
"Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" is a ballet in which a faun meets nymphs and attempts to seduce them. Nymphs are female deities that inhabit different parts of nature.
“I am trying to make the show quite vulnerable. I am not necessarily telling my personal stories but really trying to articulate and embody the ways in which being really scared and being really present can coexist,” Birssey said.
Brissey would like to save certain elements of the show as a surprise for the audience.
