A deep breath, a lick, rubbing fabric, and the delicate note of skin touching skin. These sounds emanate from a lump of 10 bodies seemingly merging into one on a large mattress — the magnetizing image of Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. This 2023 work by the Doris Duke Award-winning dance maker is “a flesh and breath sculpture,” as the choreographer has put it, utilizing bodies, sounds, scents, liquids, and objects to morph an ever-evolving tableau onstage.
“It’s a sound piece as much as it is a visual piece,” Driscoll said in a recent interview with SF Classical Voice.
Now, the multisensory work is headed to REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles for its West Coast premiere, Feb. 6–8. The symphony of bodies in Weathering is an essential part of the choreography. Each breath and sound is intentional. Driscoll’s goal is to sensitize audiences to reality. The first part of the work moves slowly, so slowly that it has been described as a somatic practice, Driscoll said. But then there’s a break that transports us. The work asks, “How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger?”
The show is set to arrive in L.A. at a delicate time, following weeks of fires and climate catastrophe. Angelenos have mobilized to support others in their community over the past month. As Weathering makes its mark in the city, it offers a much-needed opportunity to reconnect to others and the self.
Driscoll believes the work speaks to this moment and connects with people who are grieving. “The space, the sound, the proximity — they’re working on you more than anything,” she said. “It really brings out all of our mammalian ways.”
The ideas that Weathering probes stem from the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Driscoll was thinking about the absence of touch in quarantine and exploring how to touch someone through sound, specifically through the voice’s resonance. “In this work, I wanted to have the voice not just feel like an autonomous entity coming from one being but [instead feel like] it was shared,” she said.
The sound team for the production — including Sophia Brous, Ryan Gamblin, and Guillaume Soula — has transformed the voices of the performers to a point that’s deliberately disorienting. They accomplish the immersive feel of Weathering with a mixture of raw and augmented sounds. There are contact mics in the mattress, five hanging mics in the performance area, and outer mics that surround the performers’ play space (which includes parts of the audience). Brous helped turn the sounds into a score, Gamblin designed how the sound moved, and Soula found ways to distort and add to the sounds already in the space.
Driscoll wanted it to feel unclear who made each sound, prompting questions like, “Am I making the sound for you?” and “Are you making the sound for me?” There’s a give-and-take among the performers that allows their senses to morph and be heightened. As they explore, an animalistic energy surfaces.
“It’s the slowest howl you’ve ever heard, the slowest scream,” Driscoll said.
This style of movement artistry is not new for Driscoll. She’s used the voice as a choreographing tool in works like her Thank You for Coming trilogy. She considers the voice an extension of the body and works with it by changing the intention. In one moment, a sigh could be filled with pleasure, and in the next, the same kind of sigh is filled with effort and comes out more like a grunt or groan. It all depends on the body’s position and situation. The voice becomes part of the narrative, even when it is silent.
Audiences can expect to feel more in tune with their senses throughout the work. The voice is able to speak for them by depicting what it feels like to touch, taste, or see. Driscoll believes this invites people to feel differently. “I think about bringing things out,” she said. “Things that are structural and working on you or being suppressed in some way. I think that they become alive and felt and externalized.”
