We composed “Instructions for Being Water: A Performance Score” as a team of climate scientists issued a warning that humanity has only three years to dramatically lower greenhouse emissions “or face the prospect of dangerous global warming” (Nature News, June 2017). We felt compelled to respond to this warning with an awareness of leading indigenous voices coalescing around water protection, and climate justice.

To date, we’ve enacted the score twice: the first time was in Plainfield, VT in July 2017 where we convened by the water’s edge and made our way into the Winooski River, despite the chill of the water. The second enactment was in Seattle, WA in September 2017 where, with the sponsorship of Soak on the Sound, we convened in an indoor salt-water soaking tub.

The instructions articulated in the score invite participants to “make kin” through a series of activities, including story circles, meditation practices, and the co-creation of somatic experiences and memories. The flow of the performance enhances links between personal experiences and local histories, awareness of personal ethics and consciousness of the changing environment.

Our experiences revealed the potential of this score to elicit profound, transformational change. Participants both witness and co-create new public art rituals that overcome the sense of helplessness at the intractability of the problem that many participants reported feeling in pre-performance conversations.

As one participant wrote: “The experience of ‘Being Water’ brought forth the reality of the connectivity, commonalities, diversities, dependencies, and urgencies we share with each other and everything on the planet. … The practice of listening to one another’s personal stories reminded me how vulnerable, diverse, and fragile all life is and how important the stories and water are to all life. It reminds me that my own daily behaviors have an impact on the whole.”

Another, participant described her experience this way: “While participating in the “Being Water” score, I crossed a line that had been drawn deep within myself. I began to feel emotions as liquid and translucent, I could contain them no longer. I remembered times in the ocean when I had been in great danger. I had thought those memories were stored deep down, inaccessible. I had thought I came to terms with the trauma—I had, but I had not been able to drain it of the poison, the bite. In this room, full of steam and women, I found healing.”