WEATHERING By Choreographer Faye Driscoll is Coming to OZ Arts

Contemporary arts center OZ Arts Nashville will present the transformative and riveting performance Weathering by Los Angeles- based performance-maker Faye Driscoll for three nights only, April 24-26. With a rapt audience surrounding them on all four sides, ten performers cling to a revolving platform as onlookers witness the careening and awe-inspiring kinetic sculpture of vulnerable human bodies.

The unforgettable, Obie Award-winning performance has captivated audiences around the world following its 2023 premiere at New York Live Arts, launching tour engagements around the US as well as invitations in Europe and Asia. Weathering was awarded the first place "Grand Prix de la Danse de Montréal" as the best dance performance seen in the city in 2024. The international jury praised it as "a sublime, epic performance experience that echoes the catastrophes and hopes of today's world." Its arrival at OZ Arts Nashville comes on the heels of sold-out engagements in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York.

Respected as a flagbearer of the contemporary avant-garde, Faye Driscoll is a Doris Duke Award-winning performance maker who has been hailed as a "startlingly original talent" by The New York Times and "a post-millennium, postmodern wild woman" by The Village Voice. She describes her latest work, Weathering, as a "multi-sensory flesh sculpture," and a "morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene." The ten performers in the work are, at times, perfectly (almost eerily) still, and at other moments they engage in high-velocity movement that makes them seem perilously close to being flung into space. Sounds and scents add to the experience, as performers create a sonic score of voices and breaths that crescendos and resonates as the audience see bodies in various states of undress morph through physical and emotional displays of primordial fear and joy. (Note that this presentation is recommend for mature audiences.)

Among the many awards she has received for her adventurous performance works, Driscoll is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Bessie Award, and the Jacob's Pillow Artist Award. Her work has been presented at Wexner Center for the Arts, ICA Boston, MCA Chicago, and BAM, and internationally at Tanz im August, Kunstenfestivaldesarts (2021, 2024), La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d'Automne à Paris (2015, 2023), Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and Festival TransAmeriques (Montreal), among others.

Former New Dialect dancer and beloved Nashville choreographer/performer James Barrett is featured prominently in the work, marking an exciting creative homecoming for one of the most exciting talents to create work in the city in the past decade. The cast of captivating performers also includes downtown New York dance scene favorites such as Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Mykel Marai Nairne, and Jennifer Nugent.

"Weathering is truly a staggering, once-in-a-generation performance experience that will leave audiences astonished and deeply moved," said Mark Murphy, OZ Arts Executive and Artistic Director. "We are honored to be presenting Faye Driscoll and her extraordinary company of performers at OZ Arts Nashville for the first time with this unparalleled and intoxicating project that I haven't stopped thinking about since seeing it for the first time over a year ago."