By Debra Cash

When the performers finally left the platform, breathing hard, crawling towards us and into the audience, I realized I was seeing something new.

Weathering, choreographed by Faye Driscoll at the Institute of Contemporary Art, November 15-17.

A scene from Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. Photo: Maria Baranova

In time lapse photography, a flower that blooms in infinitesimal increments suddenly speeds up and explodes with botanical energy. In Weathering, Faye Driscoll, the Obie-winning New York–based choreographer who has been showing her work at Boston’s ICA regularly for a decade, inverts the process so that micro-motions of movement are presented with time for witnesses to savor, dissect, and wonder.

Like her earlier Thank You for Coming: Attendance, Weathering is composed with the audience seated in bleachers and the regular house seats on four sides of the action, surrounding a white platform. This one seems to be made of a spongy mattress material and when pushed, spins like a playground carousel. Emanating from somewhere behind us we hear the performers chant “teeth, skin, feet, mouth, hand, diaphragm, pupil, vein…” Embodiment, apparently, is on the menu.

Ten dancers dressed in street clothes (sneakers, bags, coats) enter the space and step up onto the platform (their feet sink a bit). Once assembled, they freeze as if a photographer — someone like Gary Winograd — had captured them mid-motion in the act of being alive.

Driscoll’s scenario is to have each dancer move in ways that are almost imperceptible: a finger raised here, a hip settling there, a slow blink. In the scrum, you only see the dancers positioned towards you. I ended up focusing on the always marvelous Jennifer Nugent, in black horn-rimmed glasses and green camp jacket, nonbinary Jo Warren, whose frayed shorts and pushed-up sleeves revealed a plethora of tattoos, and the initially elegantly dressed Marjani Forté-Saunders. The performers are all still moving very, very slowly when a couple of stage hands appear, spraying us and the dancers with scented water. These worker bees in black move at a conventional task-based pace. They spin the mattress slowly to reveal what was previously out of your particular line of sight.

I’m sure by this time there are people in the audience who are getting itchy and bored.

A scene from Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. Photo: Maria Baranova

Staying with it, though, is worth the effort. The performers’ reach and touch become more intense; the sounds they make — augmented by wheezy electronica and field recordings by Ryan Gamblin, Guillaume Soula, and Sophia Brous — are snippets of distress. Coats and hats and shoes and socks are slowly pulled off in ways that seem accidental; a credit card holder and ring of keys fall to the floor, quickly snatched away by the stage helpers and Driscoll herself. Someone claps hands and a plume of baby powder makes a cloud. Cory Seals peels an orange. Someone else eats a green herb and leaves the stems as litter. Driscoll places a strawberry into Amy Gernux’s open mouth as if the fruit were a pacifier.

Even when some of the dancers are completely bare there’s nothing orgiastic about their piling on and slumping off the edges of the platform, because they all seem caught in stunned disbelief. They resemble victims of some New York City Pompeii.

Driscoll has been quoted as saying that Weathering is her exploration of the climate crisis, the corruptions of materialism, and other contemporary disasters that can only be recognized by taking the long view. But “weathering” is also a term used for the long-term health effects of stress and disempowerment — especially that of Black and other marginalized people. Driscoll’s ensemble visibly spans a range of racial categories, genders, and more, but the implication is that we’re all being ground down by forces that we can’t see much less resist, until they course through our bodies and infect our social encounters.

A scene from Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. Photo: Maria Baranova

After the stagehands return to spray the dancers — and audience — with clove-scented water, they spin the platform at ever-increasing speed. The dancers — clothes still askew or gone — rush at it from the corners, jumping on and across it as it spins, narrowly missing each other, lofted by its velocity. They tear up plants — flowers, eucalyptus. Dirt is scattered over the platform and sticks to their sweat.

When the performers finally left the platform, breathing hard, crawling towards us and into the audience, I realized I was seeing something new.

They were looking at each other across the space. They were connecting.

Debra Cash, a founding Contributing Writer of The Arts Fuse is a member of its Board.