Fierce Festival: Weathering

Faye Driscoll presents the first UK performance of her internationally celebrated multi-sensory flesh sculpture Weathering.

Grappling with environmental destruction, ten performers enact a glacially morphing ‘tableau vivant’ on a rotating mobile raft-like stage. Their life raft surges and spins through crisis and alienation, with their voices generating a score that crescendos as they cling on to a platform too small to contain them.

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?

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