I’ve always said that I have a crush on dance—on the medium itself, its libidinousness, its structural uninhibitedness, the insanity of memorizing your body’s movements on command and then repeating them. As a writer, I cling to permanence on the page, but dance offers none. “Weathering,” choreographed by Faye Driscoll, and performed at the RedCat Theatre on February 6–8, leans into the artform’s inherent ephemerality: 10 dancers writhe, collapse and spill over one another on a mattress-like raft, forming a shifting, interdependent mass. The audience is seated in the round, while dancers rotate their raft-stage so that viewers are granted a complete view of the scene. The result is that the dancers’ movements feel visually lapsed: we barely catch it when they shift.
I went into the performance knowing it was inspired by climate collapse and catastrophe, but I was interested in how it would feel to see it in Los Angeles—a city mid-crisis, mid-collapse—where the air still carries the residue of wildfire and disaster has become the season we live in. Dance, with its impermanence, feels like the appropriate medium for disaster. Driscoll is known for attuning her performances to place and circumstance—was there always a dancer with a JanSport backpack eerily reminiscent of a go-bag? Do audience members always guffaw this much?
Faye Driscolls “Weathering” at REDCAT. Photo: Angel Origgi. Courtesy of REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater.
The performance begins as the dancers walk around the central stage in a flurry chanting operatically: Oh Spit, Oh Cum, Oh, Fascia. Outfitted in muted, mixed-climate attire that feels uniquely appropriate to Los Angeles (denim cut-offs, a puffer vest), they carry bags that will eventually spill out in a cacophony of capitalistic detritus: mascara, headphones, wallet, iPhone. Joining each other on the mattress, they enter a state of hyper-presence, with movements so micro-attuned that it feels as if nothing happens for a very long time.
After some time, stagehands emerge, spinning the raft slightly, and over the course of the next hour, the whole show goes pretty wild—clothes are peeled away, spit drips out of mouths onto other bodies, limbs are tangled indistinguishably; there is fruit and flowers and soil, the raft continuously accelerates, and the audience is anointed with an earthy, scented mist. The performance is also accompanied by a combination of live and recorded audio of dense breathing, humming and yelling. Seated in the front row like a kind of omniscient weatherman, Driscoll susurrates into her microphone, occasionally spinning the raft herself or wiping away sweat from the dancers.
“Weathering” demands a very generous and reciprocal presence from the viewer. There is something obscene about watching bodies work this hard. The dancers strain and sink into one another, their movements pulling urgency, exhaustion and sudden bursts of life. They move both as a unit and as individuals, attuned to each other in ways that feel both practiced and spontaneous. Their movements make me think about the choreography of effort, of removing debris after a flood or digging through ash after a fire. “Weathering” might also refer to the slow erosion of the body, the long-term effects of crisis that settle in the bones. The performance is described in promotional materials as a “multi-sensory flesh sculpture surging through the Anthropocene,” but it feels less like a sculpture than an ecosystem, an unstable and interdependent structure always threatening to collapse. Many of the poses appear drawn directly from elements of Romantic painting, particularly Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, with bodies draped over one another in precarious arrangements, their limbs reaching outward in gestures of desperation and survival.
We want to believe we can control the weather. We study it, predict it, try to shape the future in its image. But “Weathering” does something else—it exposes the mechanics of a system we are inside, whether we want to be or not. It hums with a hunger for divinity, for something beyond survival. The bodies press and yield, shaping and reshaping each other in real time. As climate change renders our city a godless inferno, this work feels like a kind of prayer. When I leave, I think about how our bodies are designed to protect us from toxins—how the nose and throat tickle to warn us, how mucus is productive. The body responds before the mind catches up. “Weathering” offers a commitment to moving through catastrophe together, body to body, breath to breath.
