Orgy, apocalypse and exorcism: Faye Driscoll’s revolving bed puts everyone in a spin

The US performance-maker’s Weathering, which evokes people clinging to a life raft, has left a trail of overwhelmed audiences. As it arrives in the UK, she reflects on creating a sensory environment to involve us all

F aye 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. “There are so many people in the rehearsal room, sometimes it feels like I’m running a small corporation,” she jokes on our video call. 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. “My parents met in New York as performer-dancers in an all-nude musical, Oh! 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. “Collaboration really affected my making, pushing me away from the preciousness that can be so strong when you work alone.”

Caught in what Driscoll calls “a collective ongoing”, the figures on stage in Weathering are a mix of ages, ethnicities, genders, body types, and presences. 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 couldn’t touch each other or even be in the same rooms. 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. Her piece flesh chariot, chariot of flesh also leans into the question of connectivity in the contemporary context, considering events in the world and how they affect us profoundly from a distance, how can things that reach us via the world-flattening device of screens still be felt as bodily experience, as trauma. “In Weathering, the spinning is the thing. As a spectator, you’re never going to get the whole picture, like in life, maybe we never do. So as the platform spins, you’re constantly re-engaging with things as they come back around, grappling with your own idea about what you’re seeing or what you might have missed.”

Indeed, perhaps the most obdurate obsession for Driscoll is the audience. “Previously, I spent eight years doing a project that asked how you sense and feel your culpability in the room when you’re watching a show. To do that, the project dealt a lot with audience participation, which I found completely horrifying.” But her struggle with participation revealed a deeper desire that still compels her: “How do I create a sensory environment that makes you understand that you are already involved in everything? That idea is the DNA of all my work.”

As Weathering intensifies towards its ending, “there’s a shedding of clothes, a kind of peeling that occurs … there are hands in mouths, hands in each other’s clothing … ”, we enter a physically and sonically overwhelming zone. The scene, flirting with the limits of control, is grotesque, passionate, tender and urgent, all at the same time. “It might look referential, like bodies from art history. Or it might look imagistic, like moments drawn from life,” says Driscoll. “You think for some time that you could know what this is that you’re looking at … but that certainty dissolves.” She pauses, a small silence on the video call, then adds, as if by way of conclusion: “I love the slipperiness of unknowing.”

Weathering is at Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham, 14-16 October as part of Fierce festival . flesh chariot, chariot of flesh is touring until 6 February. Forced Entertainment’s Cold Sweat , devised with and directed by Tim Etchells, is at Sheffield Theatres, 2-3 October; Southbank Centre, London, 9-10 October; and Lancaster Arts, 14 October.