There’s no safe harbor from the raging elements in Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. What appears to physically anchor the new performance piece in fact offers no stability. Instead, the central platform rotates at varying speeds as 10 figures crawl, writhe, and spill off its edges in a disturbing yet mesmerizing way. Is the platform a stage? A bed? A raft? Who are these ragtag people who claw and embrace, howl and moan, fall, sweat, and thrust—alternately clingy and eerily disassociated? What cataclysmic event has thrown them together on this jarring search for warmth, this journey of survival?
All remains essentially undefined. And as the work unfolds, that matters less and less. The meticulously choreographed chaos, for which Driscoll, a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts, won at Obie Award for direction last year, becomes an immersive experience for performers and audience members alike. “A sensitizing practice,” she calls it, exploring whether “we can slow down enough to be with the full impact of events much larger than us that are moving through us all, through time, throughout history…when we are kind of rushing through, numbing through, life? If we can get closer to the embodiment of our most fearful things, that may give us a greater capacity to feel or to be with it in this crazy time.”
The main craziness is “the big, ongoing pain of the climate crisis and the fact that we can make changes and we’re not.” And then there’s the “greed-driven, short-term satisfaction going on, and that we’re all kind of addicted to something, and that so much of our clothing, and everywhere so much of what we buy, is all made of petrochemicals. And children are walking into school and killing other children.” How can humans metabolize the onslaught of news, imagery, and stimuli, thrown at them every day—especially given its velocity? “Weathering very consciously slows us all down,” she notes, “and that can be a squirrelly feeling for people at first. A somatic, itchy fidget, a ‘What is this?’ question.” But then comes a moment when “people think they’ve broken through that—and time changes.” She created space for that shift, for an intimate experience of the performers’ own emotional and physical encounters on the mobile platform—which is, most globally, a symbol for life.
Driscoll, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award, among other honors, for her work on Broadway and elsewhere, is known for pushing boundaries. She eschews labels. Weathering, with its cast of dancers (many rooted in theater and vocal work), could be called dance or performance art, but neither concept quite covers it. “I think of it,” she says, “as its own thing. It’s a live art.”
Weathering can be seen at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), in Boston, November 15-17.
