The Weathering is a collaborative work comprising of Music, Film and Performance. This film was created to accompany Donnacha Dennehy’s composition for the new music ensemble Electra and premiered at the Lincoln Centre, New York in 2004 and has since been performed in the Netherlands, Canada, Bulgaria, Germany and Italy.

The film can be interpreted as a circular kind of narrative. In this way it both echoes the circularity implied by the closing section of the music and also relates itself to the cycle of the seasons and to the medieval Irish poem about the onset of winter on which the music is based. The notion of death lurks in the background of this poem, as does the idea that the night begins to suffocate the day as winter goes on. Consequently the film is about the inexorable processes of nature, sleep, death and our entanglement in these constraints. Some visual motifs are drawn from the poem. The lighting scheme and colour palette are those of the poem, the black of long winter nights, the white of snow, the red of the bracken in winter.

Composer: Donnacha Dennehy
Film Production: Aki Aro, Mark Linnane and Colm Tobin
Performance: Electra
Actor: Shona Parsons