New York Live Arts: Faye Driscoll's Weathering reaches boiling point

Have you ever watched a pot of water boil? Not metaphorically, but literally, the room-temperature water doing nothing for eternity till a bubble breaks through. Then another and another until the whole pot seethes and gurgles.

Well, that’s Faye Driscoll’s Weathering, which had an encore at New York Live Arts after its April 2023 premiere there. Atop a square, springy mattress of a platform, ten artists morph a sculpture of breath and flesh into a high-octane bacchanal. It will feel like nothing happens for the longest time until everything is happening. Whether you enjoy the shenanigans that may breach the audience’s physical and emotional boundaries isn’t the point. Applaud the performers’ fortitude and Driscoll’s mastery of evolving a concept.

The beginning sets the scene. Sing-songy recitations of body parts drift in from backstage: skin, lips, guts, dick-and-balls. Gradually, other words like cringe and algorithm intersperse, a sign that evolution, whether by accident or design, is imminent. Soon, dancers in streetwear – fanny packs, sneakers, a jean jacket – strut into the performing space, one by one. Posing on the platform, they stare into the middle distance.

Then, the cast assumes a pedestrian tableau on the platform. It is bright and it is silent. As the minutes drag on with no change, I compose a grocery list in my head.

Then, almost imperceptibly, like a flower wilting, atrophy emerges. An arm sags, a leg quavers, shoulders sink. As individual postures wither, the dancers reach out and touch someone. Fingers curl around a waistband; a knee props someone up. Bonds form. Forms decay. What belongs to whom becomes confusing as the ten collapses into and onto each other. Grabbing ahold of your fellow humans is grabbing ahold of yourself.

Since we’re sitting in the round, vantage point is everything. As such, two stagehands rotate the platform a little and then a lot and then, at some juncture, they return to really start rotating it until it’s whirling. The stagehands leave, but an object in motion must stay in motion. So, taking turns, performers slump against the platform, pushing it round and round in a task Sisyphus would recognize.

Although the tempo amps up incrementally, it’s startling to realize an epic party is underway – and has been for a while. A soundscape of moans, snuffles, gasps and wordless utterances wafts in and out. Dancers lose an item of clothing, maybe more, as their hands and feet find their way into another’s crevices. The once artful structure has mutated into a squirming jumble of touching, flirting, panting and fruit-eating. It’s a beast that feeds itself on itself.

Driscoll sits in the front, clutching a microphone. Acting as a mom, she pops up to sweep away the detritus of chomped-on strawberries and knit hats. (I see you, Faye Driscoll. I hate messes, too.) She gifts ice cubes to the half-exhausted, half-ecstatic dancers. Eventually, the clothing, the food, the objects that have been played with (a syringe, a set of keys), and the objects that have been exploded (hand claps of white powder, some weird black substance) become too much. She can’t keep up. The mess has won.

In-media-res scenarios revolve right past you, their origin and their demise remaining unknown. One dancer uses another’s knee to position her compact and apply makeup. Wait, what? Where did the compact come from and where did it go? A duo kisses, but the next time I notice them, they’re embroiled in new diversions, throwing doubt into the romance I’d scripted for them in my head. Note to self: stay in the present and don’t get attached to narratives.

The carousing cannot be contained. Performers step off, run off, fall off the still-rotating, now veering-out-of-control platform. What does the solid, stationary ground feel like to them? Apparently just fine, since they dash about, bray into microphones stationed on the sides, and fling themselves on and off the platform – some with more success than others. Confetti spews.

With ragged breathing, their spent bodies decamp to the audience. A young man, skin glistening, slouches next to me as quietude threads its way through the space, looping us together in their moment of depletion. From order to chaos, catharsis has been achieved in seventy minutes. Or about the time it takes to boil five gallons of water.