Sea Change Within Us

Sea Change Within Us
Sea Change Within Us, by Karin Stevens Dance, is a sixty-minute performance addressing local Washington state water concerns and climate change consequences through the voices of real people we interviewed, combined with moving rigid structures of water images by dancing human bodies. Ten dancers move four panels into dynamic configurations to express concerns about rivers and dams, endangered species, ice, ocean and sea-level rise, flooding, migration, Indigenous fishing rights injustice, divisive politics, and human dis/re/connection. Within these turbulent thematic layers, grief is addressed through the real sounds of Tahlequah’s cries in the “Rivers, Dams, Salmon, Orca” section. Collective awareness is awakened in the section “Descending Pressure” with the repeated phrase from a climate activist-artist, “Our bodies are a source of wisdom.” The performance encourages unification with our ecosystems and throughout difficult content there is contemplation and beauty to support the felt-urgency of our crises. As a message to disrupt a myopic, singular viewpoint, the audience is invited to view the work from all sides and participate in a simple, guided embodied movement practice to re/connect to a whole-bodied relationship with water and the ensuing performance. The project was conceived, directed and choreographed by Karin Stevens, with original sound compositions by Kaley Lane Eaton and Jessi Harvey, and large-scale installation by Roger Feldman. The recreation of this 2019 project was funded by ArtsWA, National Endowment for the Arts, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Earth Creative, and 4Culture.