A wallet on the floor. An attempt at containment that spills over. A slow unraveling. Ten performers sing an opening song of single words: “teeth, skin, mouth…” In January, the Blackwood presented Faye Driscoll’s Weathering, a multi-sensory performance where ten performers gradually entangle themselves on a mobile raft-like stage. In the continued spirit of stretching and leaking out, Durations of Soft Detail: A Compassionate Reader for Weathering is an accompanying booklet issued for the debut of Weathering at New York Live Arts (April 2023) that further elaborates its themes and motivations. This Reader post highlights themes from the Compassionate Reader ahead of the Blackwood’s presentation of Attunement Sessions 3 and 4. The Attunement Sessions are co-presented with Toronto Dance Theatre’s winter double bill, FACE RIDER and Odd-Sensual. Across four sessions, they ask: How can we attune ourselves to the world-to-come?

Durations of Soft Detail features writing by Dages Juvelier Keates (dramaturge, writer, and scent designer for Weathering), Faye Driscoll (director and choreographer for Weathering), and writer Jesse Zaritt, produced through multi-year collaborations. Across the essays, a set of recurring prompts echo onto one another: the need to tune deeply back into our senses, to hold intimacy with ourselves and with one another, and to replace the myth of the hero with the reality of our interdependencies.

In the opening essay We Are So Close, Keates writes that Weathering avoids wallowing in the powerlessness of converging crises; instead, it leans into a hyper-sensory performance which includes sound and scent. Keates calls attention to these senses, namely, how tuning into sound supports our survival: audio cues elicit quicker responses than visual cues, as our bodies take in sounds to signpost our place in the world. As the world gets louder, birdsong disappears into the noisy rush of the subway. Humid summer air carries scents across a subway car; the immediacy of smell is a reminder that sound and scent pervade our bodies in ways that are perhaps more bracing than the other senses. Weathering thus emphasizes the need to sensitize, to feel impact closely, to allow a resonance within ourselves. Keates writes:

Keates cites physicist Karen Barad’s “intra-action,” an alternative to “interaction” which proposes agency not as intrinsic, but rather, agency as carried through the energy exchanged between and against forces. This term foregrounds entanglement rather than the conventional model of cause-and-effect. Entanglement becomes vital as the climate crisis demands urgent action, yet is often met with inadequate responses. In response, Keates extends an invitation to “seep”: if our bodies, too, turn into the very systems we tend to distantiate from as we abstract the climate crisis, we risk abstracting our interdependencies and relations that keep us alive.

In Jesse Zaritt’s essay To Hold And Be Held, the writer approaches interdependency first from the prominent imagery in Weathering: on the raft-like stage, there is nowhere to hide, nor are there heroes or traditional protagonists to root for. Rather, there is ongoing negotiation amongst the performers and audience. Zaritt writes of one of Weathering’s central lessons: “...the only way through the crisis of being alive is to pay attention deeply and humbly to a constantly shifting relational matrix of mutual aid, mutual pleasure and mutual suffering.”33Zaritt, “To Hold And Be Held.” As a member of the audience, the notable indulgence of feeling too much is countered by a collective energy of feeling too much together. The performers embody intimacy, accountability, and interdependence plainly for the audience through small and large gestures.

In the Compassionate Reader, the authors elaborate the scale of our interconnectedness. Consider their Glossary definition for “transcorporeality:” “The body (human, oceanic, planetary) has never been singular or autonomous: rather, we are intra-vidual.”44Glossary entry for “Transcorporeality,” Durations of Soft Detail: A Compassionate Reader for Weathering, 2023. The Reader’s Glossary contextualizes everyday terms within the theoretical framework of Weathering, allowing for deeper thematic connections around mutuality and reciprocity to arise across the essays. As Zaritt speaks to an intimacy that develops from interdependence, it is further considered in a line of questioning present in the under the entry for “crisis.” While “crisis” is conventionally understood as a time of intense difficulty, this Glossary also recognizes that interdependency underlies crisis: “what challenges will necessitate modes of deep, empathetic listening that might extend everyone's attention beyond a preoccupation with individual well-being and self-management?”55Glossary entry for “Crisis,” Durations of Soft Detail: A Compassionate Reader for Weathering, 2023. In this framing, crisis is posited as a moment of clarity to look simultaneously within and outside ourselves for support.

Through artistic provocations, thought-experiments, and experiential exercises, The Blackwood and TDT’s Attunement Sessions foreground the necessity for deeper attunement to the processes of destruction and disaster making the world as we know it. On February 10, contributors Fran Chudnoff, Beth Coleman, and Jack Halberstam gather for Data Bodies, (De)Generative Aesthetics, Unworlding where they will ask: “How are artists exploring the radical potential of (de)generative aesthetics, inciting counter-beliefs, reconfiguring bodies and worlds, and sustaining ethical relationality? Must some things come undone in order for new ways of thinking, being, and doing to emerge? Can we revel in unworlding?” On March 15, contributors k.g. Guttman, Aisha Sasha John, Lara Kramer accept Keates’ invitation to “seep” during Attention, Sensation, Sense-Making, “considering the creative and energetic consequences of togetherness” and asking: “Can spectatorship be positioned as a choreographic process and become a rehearsal space for possible ways of entering the social and of sensing oneself in relation with others?”66Program description for the Attunement Sessions, curated by Christine Shaw and Andrew Tay. These questions cite the work of Fran Chudnoff, Jack Halberstam, and Aisha Sasha John. If the multi-sensorial Weathering extends into us, through conversation, can we extend back, composing and imagining the future we want to live in?