In this performance I combined contemporary circus arts and poet’s theater. We sought to consider and honor water and our relationship to water in western New York. Made up of improvisational scores generated through shared facilitation, it was performed as part of the Buffalo Infringement Festival within a mile of the Buffalo River. Buffalo River>Lake Erie>Niagara River>Lake Ontario>St. Lawrence>Atlantic. Local history, the border, industry and indigo, care, healing, the reparative. Wearing jeans to acknowledge our ongoing implication in waste, residue, contamination, policy, plastic.

Beginning in stillness with a textbook description of water, from air to floor, continuing with a syncopated reading of poetry and science, movers swarming with pauses according to patterns of linearity and circulation. Sentences beginning with “crest following crest” are read in a round that calls the movers to stillness. When one reader leaves, the sentences begin to disintegrate, with movers stuck in one portion of our build-a-phrase. As the spoken phrase moves into smaller particles, the movement phrase builds until nothing is spoken and there is just the sound of the movement collectively repeated. While the accordion begins breathing, the blue fabric is lifted and stretched as the river, held from silks, trapeze, and the floor. There is a little movement and the river is lowered, laid on the ground, with guardians on either end. Flutes are added and movers origin and essence across, altering the river, rising and lowering through aerial apparatus pathways intersecting with others and their materials. The river is continually held, reestablished. Backpacks are gathered from the audience and movers circle into the air, then the music stops and contamination is tossed into the river. We all begin to gather the tampons, jeans, and plastic bottles and place them in the river. A mover climbs a trapeze, speaks of water as element, and joins us in semicircles by the river where the adapted Polish folk song is sung in English (“oh you river, oh river, why are you so full?”). Breath audible, increasing in tempo, movers return the contamination to backpacks as aerialists join in a shape and drop with a “paaaa,” until there is a space beside the river to join again. A poet steps into the river, reading this dialogue.