PARTICIPATORY POETRY · INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE
Fortunate
Weather System
A system for capturing the temporary weather of a room through individual choices, personal fortunes, and a poem made collectively.
Launch the system ↗01
How it works
Audience members answer two questions. Their choices produce an individual fortune while also contributing two lines to an accumulating poem.
As each person participates, the poem grows. By the end of the performance, the individual contributions have become the room's collective weather: temporary, circumstantial, and produced by everyone who was there.
02
An introduction
Fortune, like weather and humans, is changeable and often momentary. It can be good or bad, but the words of a fortune are neither thing inherently. Fortunes are siphoned through the person receiving them and applied to the current circumstances to provide some clue as to what forces are at play in that current moment and where things may go from there.
Weather, similarly, is circumstantial and fleeting and neither good nor bad. Sure, “bad” and very destructive weather exists, but the weather itself is unintentioned and momentarily changeable. One minute a violent storm, the next a flash flood and stupendous rainbow.
With Fortunate Weather System, this evening, we will be playing together to capture the “weather” of this room. I’ll ask most of you to answer two questions, effectively contributing your conditions to the room and setting your fortune. Then I’ll read your fortune and we’ll continue adding our contributions until we capture the room’s weather.
Together we’ll assess the weather system and let it pass through us.
Basically, this is all a fancy justification to have you contribute to a collective poem and then all read it in a chorus.
Introduction delivered for a performance of Fortunate Weather System at Joshua Ware’s BASEMENT, September 26, 2026.
03
Enter the system
The interactive version remains available online. It was designed for a shared live performance, but the system can also be explored independently.
Launch Fortunate Weather System ↗