amilton de azevedo writes about Weathering, by Faye Driscoll (USA), presented in the 2024 Festival TransAmériques (FTA – Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the FTA.

“as a cosmic event / earthquakes rumble from / a beyond measurable time / from before the start / of the organic mapping / of the geological ages / instead, through a liquid timeless running / space can fold, implicate and multiply / transformation without time / spinning into existence / an embodied program / an ethics without life / pure molten in its enactment // (…) blacklight violates the separation of space / and opens an ethical horizon / with difference but without separability / human and more-than-human / all and at-once // such becomes possible / when phase replaces form / when things move without time / without destination or development / such is possible / when transformation rumbles elemental / leaving ethics stripped of value / and the human / inseparable from all matter” (excerpt of 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy, by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva)

Weathering (2023, USA) starts with words. Description. Objectiveness. Passages. Still images. Daily clothes, daily movements. Within some minutes, another space-temporality is put into place. Body-sculptures subtle gestures go slowly and flowly transforming Faye Driscoll’s living installation as the audience can look at it from different angles because of the mise-en-scène dispositive. Inchmeal, spectators are captivated as the atmosphere of the performance establishes another temporality. And they dive into an chaotic and unsettling beauty within the images of lust, violence, and everything in between and beyond.

The composition of bodies (James Barrett, Kara Brody, Amy Gernux, David Guzman, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jennifer Nugent, Cory Seals, Maya LaLiberté, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Jo Warren), from the early almost-suspended relations being weaved to the all-in risky performance that arises as the stage becomes a hurricane in the making, provide a infinite of meanings being produced within their relations with raw materiality.

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Regarding the set design itself, by Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan, resonating what is being put into motion inside it, it is possible to think of that centerpiece as a twisted version of “Lola Arias’s” (not the real argentinian artist) “The Square“, fictional work of art conceived for Ruben Östlund’s 2017 movie with the same name. In the script, the artist’s manifesto on the installation is that “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations“. In the movie, events around the piece are central to the unfolding of the narrative, at the same time that it kind of works like a metaphor, opposing the concept to the protagonist’s reality and worldview – and Östlund’s film is a quite acid critique towards contemporary art and its market.

The square in Weathering is a sort of sanctuary; and one could say that there is trust and caring as performers glide over one another and are raised up towards the sky. As it happens in the promotional video that went viral on The Square, Driscoll also creates explosions – here, only symbolic, yet quite physical and intense. The idea of this sort-of-idyllic, common space to be shared and collectively built, is developed in a somewhat-dystopian world-building throughout the performance.

After the first listings, there will be no more words; the soundscape (directed by Sophia Brous, live performed and designed by Ryan Gamblin and composed, field recorded and also designed by Guillaume Soula) is permeated by grumps, whispers, gasps, sighs, yelling. At the moment where the build-up momentum reaches the apex, turning those weathered bodies all parts of an apocalyptic orgasm, it echoes Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band (1970) experimental noise music.

Visually and sonorally disturbing, Weathering goes from everyday to nowhere; from nourishing to decay. As vivid as it can be, Driscoll’s piece creates a world of its own, ever pulsating between creation and death. And after the apocalyptic orgasm, le petite mort. There is a radical shaping and shifting energies and atmospheres. As the raft-platform-planet spins, the attitudes regarding the relation between performers amongst them and also towards the audience are constantly disconcerting as there is always an impossibility to grasp with a degree of certainty what are they experiencing – and how should one feel whilst looking at it.

Sensuality and violence dances and do I love them or do I hate them? Are they objects of desire or despite? Weathering brings pleasure and suffering, being not so comfortable to experience. The piece is there for contemplation, but the sense-provoking tools moves spectators towards being almost participants – the loose square through the stage and the movement of performers towards the audience are quite a statement that we were all part of that world that was built, presented and destroyed – not only regarding the smelling and skin-feeling activations, but also the actual risk as materialities could fly around in one’s direction and the perplexing realization that, after all that was seen, anything might happen.

There is some sort of magic in Weathering, as it appears that some of the materials being manipulated by the performers are coming from nowhere, an effective illusion as the platform spins. Small fruits, the flowers, the leaves, a gigantic rope. Other props are utilized or provided by collaborators – such as the spraying of lavender-scented water throughout the audience – and so the performance organizes itself within the transit of illusion and anti-illusionists techniques, between an intricate theatricality and an intense performativity.

The bodies of the performers are too a materiality to be dealt with, as they compose more and more impressive and unbelievable images in every spin of the platform, melting together as “phases replaces form” and “things move without time“. Driscoll is active within the organization of the piece; putting aside the practical reasons for her interference, there is also a layer of theatricality being added to Weathering within her actions. Architect of the rise and fall, she wanders in and out between chaos and cosmos, like a demiurge of that colliding world.