A Sublime of the Ordinary in the Performance "Weathering" (2023) by Faye Driscoll

Abstract

In the dance performance Weathering (2023) by Faye Driscoll, the bodies of ten dancer-performers mingle on a platform that recalls a drifting iceberg. They seem to melt away in an extreme slowness as the platform rotates faster and faster. Sweat, soil, glycerin, citrus fruits and various objects imperceptibly intertwine with this exhausted flesh. The closed systems by means of which Western thought was able to extricate the subject from the chaos of the world and give it a leading position in the Anthropocene are gradually being opened up. Ecology, understood as fundamentally transitive and interdependent, is made tangible by the disruption of the normalized order of perception. Weathering’s version of the sublime borrows from the philosophical tradition—from the Pseudo-Longinus to Edmund Burke—its totalizing and striking character, as well as its setting in proximity of opposites, but gives a prominent place to the so-called “lower” senses and to the dermal and the intimate. Driscoll’s aim is to “sensitize” the audience and set it in motion to counteract the anesthesia generated by the saturation and acceleration characteristic of neoliberal societies. This materialist sublime focuses on the interiority and becoming of movement, expression and meaning, rather than on their actualization, and thus enables the audience to experience the astonishing processual quality of ecology. Weathering conjures up a “sublime of the ordinary” in that it humbly invites the audience to experience being, and by extension, being in the world.