Faye Driscoll is in Stockholm, developing a new work for Cullberg’s entire 15-dancer ensemble titled flesh chariot, chariot of flesh. In the process she is negotiating the shift from independent projects in New York and Los Angeles to the framework of a large European dance institution. Thankfully there’s nothing corporate about Driscoll’s work, which comes from a deep, intuitive set of questions about dance, human connection, perception, ecology and community.
Since premiering in New York in 2023, her extraordinary and best-known performance, Weathering, has left a trail of overwhelmed audiences on its journey from the choreographer’s base in NY/LA to festivals across Europe and farther afield. The work’s UK premiere is a substantial coup for Birmingham’s groundbreaking Fierce festival. Weathering begins at a glacial pace, with 10 performers assuming still positions on a rotating central platform, the audience gathered around on four sides.
What follows is a compelling and challenging mix of kinetic sculpture and uncanny ritual, long-forgotten orgy, exuberant collective exorcism and intimate apocalypse. A slow build from the stillness in the first scene rises to a chaotic transformative and desperate group exertion. Rooted in techniques and understandings from choreography itself, Driscoll’s work is also dance by way of Butoh and performance art.
At the same time, it stands as a nuanced and profoundly impactful wordless reflection on the state of the world, the climate and our tangled place in it. As might be expected, Driscoll’s journey to choreography was a patchwork of influences and permissions. Calcutta! – so I guess that does feel important; when I wanted to dance, I had no problem with access to it.” After learning ballet and modern dance, she undertook conservatory training in New York.
Being exposed to the city’s downtown performance scene – shows by legendary figures such as Richard Foreman and invitations to choreograph for up-and-coming radicals like playwright Young Jean Lee – had a big effect. We could be seeing strangers plucked at random from city streets, caught off balance together on the performance podium that frames their journey. The rotating platform itself begins as stage or museum plinth but constantly takes on new connotations through the work; a bed, an improvised life raft to which people are clinging, a fragile spinning world.
It’s an irony perhaps that such a physical project as Weathering began life during Covid, with Driscoll and team researching remotely. We were using text to figure things out – taking from fight scenes and erotica, mixing the Iliad with bits of Rocky, first world war battle descriptions and porn, mashing everything together.” Although none of this material made the completed work, it’s present as a reference, says Driscoll: “I was thinking a lot about moments in daily life where we push outside ourselves and go into another body – try to be with it, to change it, where our borders as human beings blur in the most intimate ways, in fighting or in sex.” Ecological thematics ghost the piece, especially the tangled relation between humans and the nature they claim to oversee. Driscoll explains: “We are nature … we aren’t inside any weather system that we’re trying to fix … We’re part of these systems with every breath and every piss we take.” At the same time, it’s the profound malleability of the image and the audience role in making meaning that grips Driscoll.
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