Over four nights in Toronto, The Blackwood presents the Canadian premiere of Faye Driscoll’s major new performance Weathering.

Weathering is a multi-sensory performance, conceived by Driscoll as a moving human sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids, and objects. Ten performers perpetually enact a morphing “tableau vivant” on a mobile raft-like stage. Their life raft surges and spins through crisis and alienation, with their voices generating a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen, and cleave on a platform too small to contain them. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the scenes unfolding before them. Weathering enacts conflict, eroticism, and care arising from a messy and mutable collectivity.

Driscoll’s powerful work is a breathing, leaking choreography composed of micro-events and grander gestures. Weathering grapples with the Anthropocene—the geologic toll of environmental destruction resulting from human activity on the Earth—while considering its effects on individual bodies and their interdependencies. It explores the unstable boundaries between grief, anger, emergency, and eroticism. Driscoll and her 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, absence, and plume?

In Weathering, the well-trod norms and critiques of Anthropocene discourse are elided in a performance that considers the effects of climate change on us individually and collectively at a bodily scale. It reflects the forms of alienation—environmental, social, and economic—many of us feel. It demands slowness and elicits undivided attention, at a time when media saturation and ubiquity have transformed human attention into an economy. It calls on viewers to pay attention using all of their faculties—as a multisensory experience, Weathering foregrounds the necessity for deeper attunement to the many ways we inhabit the Earth.

Performed at 8pm nightly from Thursday, January 18 through Saturday, January 20. Performance at 5pm on Sunday, January 21.
Ada Slaight Hall, Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas St E, Toronto)

Weathering uses atmospheric elements such as vapour, scent, water, loud sounds, and plumes from various materials. Suggested for audiences 6 years and older.

Run time: 65 minutes.

Contributors: Amanda Boetzkes, Fran Chudnoff, Beth Coleman, Yehuda Duenyas, Macarena Gómez-Barris, k.g. Guttman, Jack Halberstam, Aisha Sasha John, Lara Kramer, John-Paul Ricco, Erin Robinsong, Marina Roy

How can we attune ourselves to the world-to-come? Presented alongside three choreographic works premiering in Toronto in winter 2024—Weathering, FACE RIDER, and Odd-Sensual—the Attunement Sessions inquire into the profound aesthetic, environmental, geopolitical, philosophical, sexual, social, and technological questions necessary to approach difficult problems about how we live, think, act, build, sense, and move together towards an imperiled future. 

Through artistic provocations, thought-experiments, and experiential exercises, the sessions foreground the necessity for deeper attunement to the processes of destruction and disaster making the world as we know it (accumulation, alienation, contamination, disembodiment, displacement, extinction, extraction, settlement...) and forms of composing and imagining the future we want to live in (affinities, edgings, interdependencies, proximities, solarities, wet dreams…).

Framed by a series of questions, the sessions bring together choreographed and improvised, intimate and planetary, descriptive and speculative approaches by participants from diverse disciplines and practices including art history, black studies, choreography, dance studies, decolonial environmental humanities, disconnection studies, feminist science & technology studies, Indigenous philosophy, intimacy coordination, poetry, queer and transgender studies, visual arts, and more.

Attunement Session 1: Ecologies of Excess, Energetic Ethics, Interdependencies
January 20, 2024, 1­–3pm, Ada Slaight Hall, Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas St E, Toronto)

Attunement Session 2: Erotic Edges, Queer Intimacy, Wet Dreams
January 21, 2024, 1–3pm, Ada Slaight Hall, Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas St E, Toronto)

Attunement Session 3: Data Bodies, (De)Generative Aesthetics, Unworlding
February 10, 2024, 1­–3pm, Toronto Dance Theatre (80 Winchester St, Toronto)

Attunement Session 4: Attention, Sensation, Sense-Making
March 16, 2024, 1–3pm, Toronto Dance Theatre (80 Winchester St, Toronto)

Presented in collaboration with Toronto Dance Theatre’s 2024 season featuring FACE RIDER by Fran Chudnoff and Odd-Sensual by Andrew Tay.

Daniels Spectrum is a physically accessible venue with single-gender accessible washrooms and drinking fountains. Eight accessible seats are available in the front row of Ada Slaight Hall; please contact the Blackwood to reserve an accessible seat. Hearing assist devices are available on request.

Parking is available underneath Paintbox Condominiums at 225 Sackville Street just to the west side of Daniels Spectrum. There is indoor access to Daniels Spectrum from this lot.  Rates: weekday and weekend (6am–6pm): $5/hr. Evenings: (6pm–6am): $5/hr.