Weathering

WORLD PREMIERE
2021-2022 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist

“Being in a place, being in an era, for instance an era of mass extinction, is intrinsically uncanny. We haven’t been paying much attention.”
-Timothy Morton, All Art is Ecological

Faye Driscoll’s newest work Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects. Ten people (dancers/singers/crew) enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen and cleave, in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the central, spiraling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking, choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Driscoll and her team of collaborators ask: How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger? Yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact? Can we slow down enough to feel the dust, hurt, howl, absence, spill, plume?

Created by Faye Driscoll
Performed by James Barrett, Kara Brody, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Amy Gernux, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jennifer Nugent, Cory Seals, Eliza Tappan, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Jo Warren
Scenic Design by Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan
Lighting Design by Amanda K. Ringger
Sound and Music Director: Sophia Brous
Live Sound and Sound Design by Ryan Gamblin
Composition, Field recordings, Sound Design by Guillaume Soula
Costume Design by Karen Boyer
Dramaturgy by Dages Juvelier Keates
Choreographic Assistant: Amy Gernux
Intimacy coordination by Yehuda Duenyas
Production Stage Management by Emily Vizina

Weathering is commissioned and produced by New York Live Arts as part of the Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist Program, which is made possible with lead funding from the Mellon Foundation and has been named for lead donors Jon Stryker and New York Live Arts board Vice-chair Slobodan Randjelović; and co-commissioned by Theater der Welt 2023 in Frankfurt – Offenbach and The Joyce Theater Foundation’s Artist Residency Center, made possible by lead funding from The Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional commissioning support provided by Wexner Center for the Arts and members of Faye Driscoll’s Commissioners Circle.

Weathering is made possible with generous support from New York State Council on the Arts, Café Royal Cultural Foundation and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and developed with residency support from Carolina Performing Arts at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, Pillow Lab at Jacob’s Pillow, and Dancers’ Workshop.