Faye Driscoll's Weathering, a performance that places 10 performers on a rotating central platform, has left a trail of overwhelmed audiences since its 2023 New York premiere. The work's UK premiere is a major coup for Birmingham's Fierce festival, where it will be staged at Midland Arts Centre from 14-16 October.
The performance begins at a glacial pace, with performers holding still positions as the audience gathers on four sides. What follows is a compelling mix of kinetic sculpture and uncanny ritual, evoking a long-forgotten orgy, an exuberant collective exorcism and an intimate apocalypse. The slow build from stillness rises to a chaotic, transformative and desperate group exertion.
Roots and Influences
Driscoll's work draws on choreography, Butoh and performance art, standing as a wordless reflection on the state of the world, the climate and humanity's tangled place in it. Her journey to choreography was shaped by her parents, who met as performer-dancers in the all-nude musical Oh! Calcutta!, and by New York's downtown performance scene, including shows by Richard Foreman and collaborations with playwright Young Jean Lee.
Currently in Stockholm developing flesh chariot, chariot of flesh for Cullberg's 15-dancer ensemble, Driscoll jokes about the shift to a large European institution: “There are so many people in the rehearsal room, sometimes it feels like I’m running a small corporation.”
A Collective Ongoing
The figures in Weathering are a mix of ages, ethnicities, genders and body types, like strangers caught off balance together. The rotating platform begins as a stage or museum plinth but takes on new connotations throughout the work—a bed, an improvised life raft, a fragile spinning world.
The project began during Covid, with Driscoll and team researching remotely. “We couldn’t touch each other or even be in the same rooms. We were using text to figure things out—taking from fight scenes and erotica, mixing the Iliad with bits of Rocky, first world war battle descriptions and porn, mashing everything together.” None of this material made the completed work, but it remains a reference.
Audience and Meaning
Ecological themes ghost the piece, especially the tangled relation between humans and nature. “We are nature … we aren’t inside any weather system that we’re trying to fix … We’re part of these systems with every breath and every piss we take,” Driscoll says. The spinning is central to the experience: “As a spectator, you’re never going to get the whole picture, like in life, maybe we never do. So as the platform spins, you’re constantly re-engaging with things as they come back around, grappling with your own idea about what you’re seeing or what you might have missed.”
Driscoll's obsession with the audience stems from an eight-year project on culpability in the room, which dealt with audience participation she found “completely horrifying.” Her deeper desire: “How do I create a sensory environment that makes you understand that you are already involved in everything? That idea is the DNA of all my work.”
As Weathering intensifies, it becomes physically and sonically overwhelming, with a shedding of clothes and intimate contact. “It might look referential, like bodies from art history. Or it might look imagistic, like moments drawn from life,” she says. “You think for some time that you could know what this is that you’re looking at … but that certainty dissolves.” She adds: “I love the slipperiness of unknowing.”
Weathering is at Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham, 14-16 October as part of Fierce festival. flesh chariot, chariot of flesh is touring until 6 February. Forced Entertainment’s Cold Sweat, devised with and directed by Tim Etchells, is at Sheffield Theatres, 2-3 October; Southbank Centre, London, 9-10 October; and Lancaster Arts, 14 October.
