Like Water Movement Collective

At A Glance

Location: 

Sharon, Vermont

Primary Issue Area:

  • Land & Water
  • Living Economies

Active since:

2020

  • Five dancers stand outdoors, facing to the right, with their right arms stretched out in front of them.
  • Five dancers outdoors stand backwards, in front of a pond, with their right arms outstretched above their heads.
  • two dancers sit in the grass. One dancer leans over her legs, while the other dancer rests on the first dancer's back.
  • Five dancers outdoors lean to the right in a lunge, with their arms outstretched.

Our Purpose

Our purpose is to use interdisciplinary performance art-making and presenting to build a vision for a future filled with loving community and abundant resources. Through movement, theater, song, sound scores, and a relationship with the natural space around us, the performers exist in community, fall apart in conflict by hoarding resources and seeking power over each other, and come back together first in grief, then in love and healing. Through movement and performance art, we bring community members together to witness and be enveloped by these questions: how can dance be used in ceremony, creating community, and unity through climate disaster? How can we use community to create structural change? We aim to find resiliency and love inside our circles, to then extend outside of those circles. This project was originally envisioned by Lucia Gagliardone and Carol Langstaff, whose close relationship was built over 23 years of collaboration and mentorship. The original live performance, Like Water, focused specifically on water sovereignty issues. The current performance work, WANTING, envisions a movement ritual of confronting resource scarcity and climate destruction due to late-stage capitalism and the hoarding of wealth, and reimagining this tragic state of society into one of abundance and resiliency.