Weather is a thick term. It can describe a wearing away or change in appearance due to long exposure. It also, of course, indicates the state of the atmosphere at a particular place and time. To weather, moreover, is to emerge, alive, through tumult. Faye Driscoll’s latest project, Weathering, troubles the distinctions between the multiple meanings of its titular root in order to provide a multi-sensory, leaky cry against surrender and despair in the face of a collapsing environment. As bodies entangle and disentangle, fall and rise again, throw dirt, moan, shed the layers of the street clothes that make up their costumes, and spray scented mist from handheld bottles, ways of moving through chaos are revealed. The work does not offer resolution or order but rather insists on endurance, adaptation, and mutual becoming.

This becoming begins with a chant as the names of body parts echo from somewhere offstage. Bodies emerge and wander about the padded, raft-like platform that sits in the stage’s center until all performers find stillness atop the raft. A tangled tableau of outstretched limbs bares a blaring resemblance to the bodies clinging to Géricault’s Raft of Medusa for dear life. Though composed centuries earlier, Géricault’s painting of working-class bodies annexed to a makeshift raft and stranded at sea provides a glimpse into the same frontiers of the modern human condition that Driscoll approaches through Weathering .11Harvard. (2025, March 17). Géricault’s Staying Power | Index Magazine | Harvard Art Museums. Harvard Art Museums. https://harvardartmuseums.org/article/gericault-s-staying-power For both Medusa and Driscoll’s raft confront the edges of what it means to be a body in a rapidly changing world through stillness and storm.

In the performance’s early stillness, quivering legs fighting for balance on the plush platform serve as quiet reminders that life is never fixed. Chests rise and fall, and the effort of stillness is exposed. With remarkable control, bodies begin to move, so slowly at first that movement is hardly perceptible. But then it becomes possible to identify hands that weren’t touching before in a clasp. Body parts that were estranged find one another, and through the careful noticing of relationality, movement becomes evident. New points of contact emerge. Two performers descend from the theater’s lighting booth and rotate the platform, round, and round, and round. The performers move faster and are in a noticeably different position each rotation; props enter the scene. Bodies cascade over and atop one another as if Simone Forti’s Huddle wandered into a dreamscape laced with psychedelics, where ropes and bricks dance too. A score of breaths and moans echoes throughout the space.

The scene spirals. What began as delicate shifts in balance becomes a full-bodied storm—high-velocity sprints, leaps, and collisions race across the stage. The vocal cries grow louder. The elements rear—spray bottles are used to mist the audience, a bucket of dirt is thrown across the cream platform. Performers take turns revolving the platform by frantically pushing its corners. The raft is destabilized so that it spins towards the shins of audience members seated at stage level. There is no containment. The audience becomes complicit in and at risk of the disorder until the performing bodies, exhausted, return to drawn, measured movements. The storm subsides. From within a social order transpiring at an accelerating pace, where crises unfold and dissipate in rapid succession, Weathering offers a reminder that slowness, tumult, attunement, and incongruence are all vital means of embodied endurance.

Weathering is not simply a meditation on ruin but a testament to the generative potential within breakdowns, the rhythms that emerge from disorder, and the deep physical knowledge that bodies hold about how to persist. Through the tumult of the choreography and prop performances that ensue, weather is presented not only as something in which the human body lives through but as an entity ignited by the immediacy of embodied existence. The intimate imbrication between the human body and weathering poses a radical reimagining of the body’s relationship to the environment in which the body serves as an archive of its surroundings and relations, as well as an agent for making future atmospheres possible.