Fierce Festival

14 — 18 October

Donate
SCHEDULE:
  • Wheelchair Accessible Visual
  • Wheelchair Accessible Visual
  • Wheelchair Accessible Visual

DURATION:

65 mins

VENUE:

Midland Arts Centre – Main Theatre
Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham B12 9QH

BUY TICKETS

Weathering

Faye Driscoll

(Los Angeles)

UK Premiere 18+

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?

FIERCE SAYS

“If the excitement around Weathering hasn’t made it to your group chats yet, then: welcome. What a thrill to be bringing this monumental work to the UK for the first time with our friends at Fabric. Weathering is a full body experience that vibrates and electrifies the senses. Who knew the end of the world could be so sublime?”

“An enthralling, epically adventurous work.”
The New York Times

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?

FIERCE SAYS

“If the excitement around Weathering hasn’t made it to your group chats yet, then: welcome. What a thrill to be bringing this monumental work to the UK for the first time with our friends at Fabric. Weathering is a full body experience that vibrates and electrifies the senses. Who knew the end of the world could be so sublime?”

PRESENTED WITH

Fabric

artist bio

▶︎

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).

CREDITS

▶︎

Conception, Choreography and Direction: Faye Driscoll
Performance: James Barrett, Kara Brody, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Amy Gernux, David Guzman, Maya LaLiberté, Mykel Marai Nairne, Jennifer Nugent, Cory Seals, Jo Warren
Scenic Design: Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan
Lighting Design: Amanda K. Ringger
Sound and Music Direction: Sophia Brous
Live Sound and Sound Design: Ryan Gamblin
Composition, Field recordings, Sound Design: Guillaume Soula
Costume Design: Karen Boyer
Dramaturgy and Scent Design: Dages Juvelier Keates
Choreographic Assistance: Amy Gernux
Intimacy coordination: Yehuda Duenyas
Production Manager/Lighting Director: Connor Sale & Will Monks
Stage and Props Management: Neva Guido
Producer: J. Alex Mathews

VENUE INFO

There is level, gently sloping or permanent ramp access at the entrances to MAC, as well as throughout our building. All floors are serviced by our main lift, located close to our bar and cinema. Accessible unisex toilets are available on every floor. Find out more here.

access

Wheelchair accessible. Visual.

CONTENT WARNINGS

Nudity

 

 

 

 

“An enthralling, epically adventurous work.”
The New York Times