Meandering River

Press Release:

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but listen! if you listen
I will move you a few known sounds
in a constant irregular pattern

 —Alice Oswald, Dart

 

Meandering River invites audiences to explore the intertwined ecologies of humans and nonhumans, water and infrastructure, along the Iowa River. Inspired by Astrida Neimanis’s concept of ‘hydrocommons,’ this project considers bodies and water as interwoven in a dynamic, reciprocal relationship. To care for water is to care for the bodies it sustains. The performance highlights the fluid, relational nature of place, where the river collaborates with the landscape and those who dwell within it. Movement along the riverbank becomes a way to understand and map the overlapping histories, ecologies, and infrastructures that constitute our shared environment.

 

Audiences will gather at the Lagoon Shelter House and travel along the west side of the Iowa River through a guided walking-tour featuring dancers, soundscapes, and interactive prompts designed to enhance awareness of the river’s presence and significance. Through this journey, participants are encouraged to reconsider the river in the grander scale of geological space and time and to reconsider their relationship to the river, not as detached observers, but as co-participants in an ongoing dialogue. The experience aims to shift perceptions of the river from a mere backdrop or resource to a living presence with its own vital agency.

 

The aesthetic tone of the performance is one of progressive emergence that starts in play and ends in focussed presence. We invite audiences into delightfully surprising moments of discovery through which they greet the river anew as a startling entity with novel scales of time and space, as an active communicator that expresses itself in unexplored registers. We arrest attention to carry audiences into sustained, slow, and spacious presence with the river, which we cultivate in the final parts of the performance and invite the extension of this attention into ongoing relationships that last into the future.

 

Meandering River emerges from a collaboration among hydrologists, engineers, dancers, artists, and scholars and emphasizes co-creation and shared experience. The audience contributes to the performance’s unfolding through their own movement, perception, and engagement with the river, the performers, and each other. By mapping new constellations of relationships among human and environmental elements, Meandering River encourages a deeper understanding of the river’s significance and promotes more equitable and thoughtful ways of engaging with water, land, and community. Embodied participation and creative exploration may cultivate new ways of seeing, feeling, and responding to the complex ecologies that surround us.

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Funding for this project is provided by:

The Big Field Fund, a Regional Regranting Program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts administered by Public Space One

The National Endowment for the Arts and the Iowa Arts Council, which exists within the Iowa Economic Development Authority

Public Arts Matching Grant City of Iowa City

Blue-Green Action Platform

UIowa Office of Sustainability and the Environment UIowa Departments of Religious Studies, Communication Studies, and English