Returning Choreographic Fellow | February 12 - 19, 2023
Weathering
Returning Choreographic Fellow, Faye Driscoll came back to MANCC from February 12 to 19, 2023 to further develop her work, Weathering.
As Driscoll’s newest work, Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects. Ten performers consisting of dancers, singers, and production crew glacially morph moment to moment 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?
While at MANCC, Driscoll focused this 7-day residency with her performers and design team to further an extended series of highly physicalized explorations that mesh movement, vocalizations and a uniquely designed and tourable mobile stage, which together manifest the work’s conceptual concerns.
Driscoll’s residency culminated in an open rehearsal for both the public and FSU School of Dance students and was interactive, incorporating a multiplicity of natural elements as well as singing, movement and props.
Brooklyn-based dancemaker, performer, writer and long-time collaborator with Driscoll, Jesse Zaritt, joined Driscoll in residency for three days as part of MANCC’s Embedded Writers Program serving as writer and seasoned thought partner on the work.
Weathering will premiere at New York Live Arts on April 6 – 8 & 13 – 15, 2023.
This residency for Weathering was supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Embedded writer Jesse Zaritt’s participation was supported by the Mellon Foundation.
Childcare subsidy to two parent/artist collaborators was supported by the Sustainable Arts Foundation.
Maggie Allesee
