Weather explores the current global ecological crisis and its embodied impact through site-specific choreography and sonic experiences that will engage with the natural landscape and built environment of the University of Toronto Mississauga’s campus. Each solo vignette plays with the idea of instability, of teetering on the brink of disaster. Spectator peregrination through the campus is required.

Endangered Species examines the body as a container of historical processes at their tipping point. A de-stabilized structure of raw exposed nerve endings firing endlessly and out of order. A place where immense forces of history collapse into our present reality and manifest in the ecology of the body.

Water offers the body as a vessel of ancestral and landscape memory. The accumulation of our fluids, our orgasms, our births, our rituals, our tears. The pathways of the colonizers, the natural resources depleted by our capitalist economies. The potential for buoyancy and drowning. Shape shifting oceans and glaciers moving across our landscapes.

Shrinking Habitats explores encroachment and enclosure. The howl of a land/body urbanized, colonized, liquefying, drying and depleting. The scars of industry and the imbalanced relationships between our bodies, economies, and landscapes in a slow burn meltdown.

Wind offers a time lapse of the body as landscape through the continual process of erosion. The body becomes a divining weather vane, the trade winds of the colonial project, a future antennae transmitting and receiving signals through the air. The precarious balance of all of the converging forces of history and future possibilities existing in a simultaneous space of moving forward and back in time. The forces of accumulation and dissolution.

The profound ecological changes currently underway have made it crucial to think with geological time scales and to link seemingly disparate events across the globe, namely colonialism, unregulated capitalism, and globalization. The weather emerges as a strange figure of a kind of metaphysical instability. It’s as if the market collapse and the dismantling of the fortress of the state as absolute shelter has amplified a sense of vulnerability to the elements to a point where the earth’s atmosphere responds in kind. Weather produces a kind of amplification of these details in a manner that indexes the variegated rhythms of non-human and human matter.

Weather looks to the human body as a conductor for explicitly engaging with the physical, political, and chemical composition of the Earth. The performance presents issues that are often rendered as ‘dry science’ in a way that enables emotional responses and encourages us to re-envisage future and past relations between earthly volatility and bodily vulnerability. Weather makes visible the differential impacts—past, present, and future—that have come to shape the relationships among human and non-human actants, living in an era of extreme hydrocarbon extraction, extreme weather events, and extreme economic disparity. Each site-specific solo vignette plays on the idea of instability, of teetering on the brink of disaster.

—Christine Shaw, Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery