climate; community dance; environment; environmental arts; Global Water Dances; social justice; somatic practices; water
Global Social Challenges: Cities and Communities, Democracy, Power and Governance, Life Stages and Intergenerationality
This chapter analyses a local iteration of an international event focused on dancing for safe water for everyone: Global Water Dances. This large-scale project provides a lens on the ways in which communities form and dissolve on local and global scales, shifting the traditional boundaries and linear narratives of success which have led to this extraordinary era of crises, including climate crises. Foregrounding how, in this context, community is understood as a fluid, with processes in need of ongoing regeneration and reinvention, the chapter attends to how we move together in time; how we dare a mingling of selves and others, local and global. Connecting these concerns, the chapter explores how Global Water Dances aims to think and move with water and each other, to contribute to a shifting sensibility about water as central to issues of social justice, as much as an issue of environmental concern.