A web-based, choose-your-own-adventure experience of PETE’s Weather Room

For eleven nights only, PETE presented ticketed, nightly access to this performance of the Weather Room, featuring three solo performances, recorded in the same environment and with the same timecode and design score. Live audiences could choose to watch one performance all the way through, or move between the three pieces, editing their own experience. Weather Room: a record of standing in the dark down by the river... is an invitation to survey a moment in time from late-2020, with an eye towards seeing- and imagining- what comes next.

PETE’s Weather Room is our ongoing experiment in wrestling with the climate crisis and creating new work in a pandemic. PETE’s design team began by creating a room, an environment, a cycle of weather that lasts exactly 23:26 (taken from the tilt of the earth’s axis). It’s a room without walls, filled with sound, wind and light, astro turf and clay birds, stripes and bee suits. 

We drove it to the suburbs, to inner-southeast and far Lents, and on November 1st, on dias de los muertos, all saints day, two days before the election, we finally parked it down by the river, on the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, bands of the Chinook, many of whose descendants make up the indigenous community in Portland.

We put ourselves in it, we danced and sang, lamented and listened.  

We waited for the moon. 

We made a record of that moment to share with you...

Weather Room Youth Project: visions of a future 

PETE has conceived of the Weather Room Project as a focal point for community dialogue, a gathering place of dreams, stories and ideas about the future. To that end, we hope to curate a series of performances inside and around the Weather Room. 

In the first of these collaborations, PETE has teamed up with a group of young artists to create a companion piece to the Weather Room. In partnership with Northwest Children’s Theatre and directed by Tamara Carroll, PETE commissioned six young artists to create a short piece that thinks about possible futures in relationship to climate change. This work will be available to view after the performance of the Weather Room: a record of standing in the dark down by the river... along with more information about the work and our collaborators. 

Production Credits:

Weather Room

Scenographer and Lead Artist -  Peter Ksander 

Director -  Amber Whitehall

Light Design -  Miranda Hardy

Sound Design - Mark Valadez 

Costume design - Jenny Ampersand

Property Design - Maggie Heath

Video, Streaming, and Web Design - Trevor Sargent 

Production Manager - Molly Gardner

Location and Patron Services - Kristina Mast

Carpenter and Transportation - Mike Wax

PETE performer/creators -  Jacob Coleman, Rebecca Lingafelter, Cristi Miles

Youth Partners

Youth Artistic Lead - Tamara Caroll

Youth Project Performers:

Della Cosloy

Jamie Mack

Arjun Pai

Elijah Castillo

Amelia Dusevoir

Taylor Putzek

ICP Cohort Performers

Claire Rigsby

Dylan Hankins

Elsa Dougherty

Kelsea Ashenbrenner

Logan Starnes

Rachel Wells

Rose Proctor

Weather Room is made possible by Ronni LaCroute, Harold Goldstein and Carol Streeter, Ellen Walkley and Brian Myers, Charlene Zidell, The Mental Insight Foundation, MAP Fund, The Kinsman Foundation, The CRFCS Fund through the Oregon Cultural Trust, Lewis & Clark College Theatre Department, The Reed College Theatre Department, and Zidell Yards.

Thank you to Northwest Children’s Theatre and Sarah Jane Hardy, Alan Park, Resonance Ensemble, and BodyVox.

All photos by Peter Ksander