Blue Waters (2022)

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To set the scene:
We’re here on sandy beaches. Pink panther skins glimmer beside you in sunlight. You’re on vacation. Applying a little more SPF, you feel the warmth tickling your skin. Waves gently rolling inwards, kissing your toes.
It’s a day like any other on vacation, the kind of day where you don’t even know what day it is because it doesn’t matter to you. Elsewhere it matters to someone else. It’s Saturday. Soon it will be Monday. Monday, the work week commences and UPS drivers will deliver boxes to people’s homes, school teachers will arrive early to greet children mourning the longed weekend, stock traders will tighten their ties and head to wall street, and you will return to the beach. Maybe with a book this time. Have you tried eat pray love? How about i love dick?
And here you are:
Blue Waters is a performance built around two characters: a tropical storm and a sunburned tourist. Our script, performed live and broadcasted as a radio program, followed the two characters until their moment of meeting, an interruption of great disaster. Throughout the script, we returned to a song from Sally Oldfeild titled “Blue Waters” which sings about a love that takes over like a river crashing into her. This form of interruption was a returning point in our research as a question “What interruptions do we invite into our lives and which interruptions violently uproot us?” We placed the moment of bliss and introspection while on vacation in juxtaposition with the effects of a tropical storm to consider the roles that tourist capitalism plays in climate change and how larger looming catastrophes can be made parallel to our own internal dilemmas.
Performance was made in collaboration with Gloriya Avgust and was presented at the Piet Zwart Institute Open Studios, Rotterdam (NL), 2022. The research was generously supported by Stichting Droom en Daad. Photo documentation by Steven Maybury. Video documentation by Kotryna Buruckaitė and Julia Dahee Hong.