Fierce Festival: Weathering
–About Fierce Festival: Weathering
Faye Driscoll presents the first UK performance internationally celebrated Weathering
Faye Driscoll’s 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?
About the Artist: Faye Driscoll
Faye Driscoll is an award-winning art and performance maker hailed as a “startlingly original talent” by The New York Times and “a post-millennium postmodern wild woman” by The Village Voice. She uses an alchemy of bodies, voices, objects and live sound to conjure worlds that are, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. Through immersive, sensorial tableaux and perceptual disorientations, she aims to rile up the passive, numb, screened-out body.
She was the 2021–2022 Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts and is the recipient of numerous honours, including a Doris Duke Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Bessie Award, and the Jacob’s Pillow Artist Award. In 2023, she received an Obie Award, followed by the Grand Prix at the 2024 Prix de la Danse de Montréal for her performance, Weathering. Driscoll is the recipient of the 2026-27 Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize and will be a Rome Prize Fellow in Environmental Arts and Humanities at the American Academy in Rome in 2027.
Her work has been presented at leading cultural institutions and festivals worldwide, including Wexner Center for the Arts, REDCAT, ICA Boston, MCA Chicago, Jacob’s Pillow, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens), Centro de Arte Experimental (Buenos Aires), Festival Dias da Dança (Porto), Festival TransAmériques (Montreal), Athens Epidaurus Festival, Julidans (Amsterdam), and the Meteorite Autumn Festival (Tokyo).
Co-presented by Fierce Festival and Fabric as part of THIS IS DANCE, a growing collective of Birmingham organisations developing the city’s position as a global centre for dance.
With support from Midlands Arts Centre
Funded by Arts Council England
Booking info
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