TY - JOUR
T1 - Water marks and water moves
T2 - Community arts and thinking with water
AU - O'Gorman, R.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2018.
PY - 2019/1/1
Y1 - 2019/1/1
N2 - This essay investigates how movement-based practices activate and embody a sensibility and awareness of how water moves both inside and alongside the human body. This approach troubles the mainstream understanding of water as commodity or external force. Following and troubling ideas from new materialism and (hydro)feminist theories, Neimanis and Haraway in particular, this paper offers a theoretical framework on a practice-as-research based community project, Global Water Dances (GWD) (http://globalwaterdances.org/). This work connected a local Cork based group (which involved children, professional dancers, a teenage youth theatre group, and international students and local community members) within the project to over 100 communities around the globe. GWD seeks to connect specific local communities and issues with a larger scale global sensibility by raising awareness about water issues through dance as a shared expressive form. The event allowed us to focus our concerns in response to particular protests around austerity and water rights current in Ireland and local flood management issues while also allowing us to connect this water rich and overflowing country in counter-point to a number of global sites and issues. Our aim was to think and move with water and each other and to contribute to a shifting sensibility about water as central to issues of social justice as much as an issue of environmental concern. This essay offers a range of registers to evoke how we live in common with water; alongside a discussion of a global-scale community arts event, and theoretical framework, there are a range of images and passages which record and foreground daily and local ways of being with water. This approach developed from movement practices in the performing arts; these practices extend into a writing practice which seeks to move performatively with water, to see what it does with us, to ask where and how we are water made, water marked and water moved.
AB - This essay investigates how movement-based practices activate and embody a sensibility and awareness of how water moves both inside and alongside the human body. This approach troubles the mainstream understanding of water as commodity or external force. Following and troubling ideas from new materialism and (hydro)feminist theories, Neimanis and Haraway in particular, this paper offers a theoretical framework on a practice-as-research based community project, Global Water Dances (GWD) (http://globalwaterdances.org/). This work connected a local Cork based group (which involved children, professional dancers, a teenage youth theatre group, and international students and local community members) within the project to over 100 communities around the globe. GWD seeks to connect specific local communities and issues with a larger scale global sensibility by raising awareness about water issues through dance as a shared expressive form. The event allowed us to focus our concerns in response to particular protests around austerity and water rights current in Ireland and local flood management issues while also allowing us to connect this water rich and overflowing country in counter-point to a number of global sites and issues. Our aim was to think and move with water and each other and to contribute to a shifting sensibility about water as central to issues of social justice as much as an issue of environmental concern. This essay offers a range of registers to evoke how we live in common with water; alongside a discussion of a global-scale community arts event, and theoretical framework, there are a range of images and passages which record and foreground daily and local ways of being with water. This approach developed from movement practices in the performing arts; these practices extend into a writing practice which seeks to move performatively with water, to see what it does with us, to ask where and how we are water made, water marked and water moved.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85062509239
U2 - 10.1093/cdj/bsy053
DO - 10.1093/cdj/bsy053
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85062509239
SN - 0010-3802
VL - 54
SP - 119
EP - 144
JO - Community Development Journal
JF - Community Development Journal
IS - 1
ER -
