Faye Driscoll: Weathering

Conceived, choreographed and directed 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. 

Curated by Christine Shaw.

Ticket sales begin on December 1, 9am EST. General and discounted admission rates available. Visit the Blackwood website to purchase.

Over four nights in Toronto, The Blackwood presents the Canadian premiere of Faye Driscoll’s major new performance Weathering.

Weathering is a multi-sensory performance, conceived by Driscoll as a moving human sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids, and objects. Ten performers perpetually enact a morphing “tableau vivant” on a mobile raft-like stage. Their life raft surges and spins through crisis and alienation, with their voices generating a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen, and cleave on a platform too small to contain them. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the scenes unfolding before them. Weathering enacts conflict, eroticism, and care arising from a messy and mutable collectivity.

Driscoll’s powerful work is a breathing, leaking choreography composed of micro-events and grander gestures. Weathering grapples with the Anthropocene—the geologic toll of environmental destruction resulting from human activity on the Earth—while considering its effects on individual bodies and their interdependencies. It explores the unstable boundaries between grief, anger, emergency, and eroticism. Driscoll and her 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, absence, and plume?

In Weathering, the well-trod norms and critiques of Anthropocene discourse are elided in a performance that considers the effects of climate change on us individually and collectively at a bodily scale. It reflects the forms of alienation—environmental, social, and economic—many of us feel. It demands slowness and elicits undivided attention, at a time when media saturation and ubiquity have transformed human attention into an economy. It calls on viewers to pay attention using all of their faculties—as a multisensory experience, Weathering foregrounds the necessity for deeper attunement to the many ways we inhabit the Earth.

Programs
A multidisciplinary program series will run alongside Weathering to expand its socio-political concerns. With 16 contributors across four events, the series includes panel discussions, performances, poetry readings, and experiential workshops.

January 20, 2024: Ecologies of Excess, Energetic Ethics, Interdependencies
January 21, 2024: Erotic Aesthetics, Queer Intimacy, Wet Dreams
February 10, 2024: Wild Edges, (De)Generative Aesthetics, Reworlding
March 16, 2024: Attention, Attunement, Sense-Making

Presented in collaboration with Toronto Dance Theatre’s 2024 season featuring FACE RIDER by Fran Chudnoff and Odd-Sensual by Andrew Tay.

Performances
Performed at 8pm nightly from Thursday, January 18 through Sunday, January 21 at Ada Slaight Hall, Artscape Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas St E, Toronto). Weathering uses atmospheric elements such as vapour, water, loud sounds, and plumes from various materials. Suggested for audiences six years and older. Run time: 65 minutes.

Accessibility
Artscape Daniels Spectrum is a physically accessible venue with single-gender accessible washrooms and drinking fountains. Eight accessible seats are available in the front row of Ada Slaight Hall; please contact the Blackwood to reserve an accessible seat. Hearing assist devices are available on request.

Acknowledgments
Weathering is presented in partnership with Toronto Dance Theatre with the support of Dancemakers, DanceWorks, FADO Performance Art Centre, and TO Live and funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the University of Toronto Mississauga, and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.