Nashville Dance Artist EMMA MORRISON
on
WEATHERING
I will never forget the first time I saw Faye Driscoll’s work. It was 2013 and I watched a duet between Faye and Jesse Zaritt called You’re Me at the American Dance Festival. Witnessing the feelings of freedom and mayhem generated on the stage, I felt as if anything was possible.
I haven’t been so moved by a performance until I saw Faye’s latest work, Weathering, which is described as a “multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects.”
“We are oftentimes left unable to tell where one body ends and another begins, and seeing this level of closeness is a radical act in itself.”
Faye Driscoll is a highly awarded performance maker whose work focuses on how humans interact with each other. In Weathering, the audience views the performance from all four sides of a rotating, raft-like mattress “stage” on which a sculpture of ten bodies imperceptibly shifts to reveal new relationships, objects, liquids and stuff. We see a fake nail fall on the mattress surface, and in the next rotation we see from whose finger it fell. Next, we might watch a couple moving slowly towards something that looks like a loving embrace, and the next moment they are wrapped up in a warped and tension-filled fall, as though they have been falling forever. We see glistening fingertips reaching for the ceiling as another hand is zipping a bottle of lube back into a fanny pack. We are oftentimes left unable to tell where one body ends and another begins, and seeing this level of closeness is a radical act in itself.
In this unforgettable work, there is no soloist or featured dancer. We see each performer’s excellence, reaching the capacity of their movement, only to reset and begin again, going further the next time. Faye’s work asks its dancers to continually pass into a curious sense of danger that pulls the viewer in, and that reaches an absolute peak by the end
After my first experience seeing this work in New York, I left the performance feeling ultra-human, highly aware of my proximity to the people around me, wanting to touch everything and wanting everything to touch me. Faye’s work is often described as avant garde, but to me the ultra-nuanced, hyper-tactile exaggeration of the human experience displayed in her work is extremely relatable. The movements and actions that I see the performers experience in Weathering are things that I have wanted to do in moments of awkwardness with another person, or in moments of extreme joy or deadening sorrow, shown in macro. Weathering is unifying in its uniqueness, with each of our senses becoming so engaged that what ends upbeing created is a sixth sense, a deepening understanding of how the shifts of the world affect each of us individually, and how our shifts affect the world.
“Weathering asks for our patience, our attention, and our curiosity.”
Weathering asks for our patience, our attention, and our curiosity. It is playful, dark, full of joy, of fear, and of chaos. I am honored to live in a city that is presenting this work. It represents what I ultimately love most about performance; the unpredictability of existence and how that very fact can connect us all.
I hope you all will join me at OZ April 24-26 to have your own experience with Weathering. I look forward to the conversations and connections it is sure to inspire.
Emma Morrison is a Nashville based dancer, teacher and maker. She has worked with choreographers such as Roy Assaf, Yin Yue, Brian Arias, Rosie Herrara and more. She is a founding member of New Dialect, PYDANCE and Garage Collective. Emma has been teaching early childhood movement and contemporary dance with the Metro Parks Dance Division since 2013, and she has been a teaching artist at Belmont University, Vanderbilt University, MTSU, Nashville School of the Arts, TSU, University of the South, The Juilliard School, and Booker T. Washington High School.
