36.5 / A Durational Performance With The Sea
https://www.36pt5.org
36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea is a series of performance works and video works created by Sarah Cameron Sunde that engage people on personal, local, and global scales in conversations around deep time and sea-level rise. It began with a poetic gesture – standing in water for 12 hours and 48 minutes while the tide rose and fell on her body – and has grown into a complex, collaborative, evolving series of works spanning seven years and six continents. By executing these works in seas around the world in both a live form and video form, we hope that each individual that encounters the project will consider our contemporary relationship to water, as individuals, in community, and as a civilization.
Each work in the series consists of deep community engagement, live performance event, a time-lapse video, and a long-form cinematic video work from a different coastal location.
I came to be a part of this on an inspiration. I called my friend Emily who started Works on Water and asked her what projects she was working on. She told me she was curating a durational performance with the interdisciplinary Artist Sarah Cameron Sunde an at that moment was writing something about it. I had never heard of Sarah, but I offered to take a read and edit her piece. What I read touched something deep. I called Emily said change the first paragraph and I need to be a part of this.
I have been building temples and building gardens (habitat restoration and pollinator gardens) and have decided that in the wake of our climate crisis and global inhumanity to humanity that to make a difference I would change careers.
My new Job Title:
Sacred Space Infrastructure Specialist
Sarah’s 36.5 was called a durational art, but something way more than art. It is a sacred act to heal our oceans, who lived communities near them and to respect the ancestral indigenous cultures who lived here long before we changed the landscape and their traditions.
I see it also as a sacred relationship with our earth’s oceans and the word sacred is very important here. The sacred opens the heart, it opens vulnerability, it opens connection to humanity and to the earth. It is about bringing an intimate awareness to our climate crisis and sea-level rise and how the health of our oceans touch each of us in a very very personal way.
It is a radical moment, the Durational performance is participatory with the people who arrive and stand with Sarah. Everyone brings a different story, everyone’s experience is unique, but all are intimate and all are feeling their connection to the woman wearing the red jacket and the salt water she is standing in. Sarah stands for the full tidal cycle, no small feat, she feels more like a meditative monk than a performance artist
This New York performance at the estuary in Astoria NY is the last of nine global locations. Low tide was at 7:23am, high tide at 1:58pm and the final low at 8:02pm, that is thirteen long hours Sarah stands in a silent, still, meditative state. Many of us stand with her. It is a lot like the Temples we make, where each person brings their story. The act of standing in water is that same feeling of sharing sorrow, but here it is for our planet’s waters, but also, for our own loss and grief. We are all water and this is a place to let some of those things we have held for so long flow out with the tide. Healing ourselves is also healing the water.
Sarah and I faced time briefly during one of the dust storm towards the end of my stay at burning man. I told her of the work I have done with David Best building Temples, the habitat and garden design I do in my Contractor world and I explained the significance of my new job title–– Sacred Space Infrastructure Specialist. I explained how that building with intention is different than just building for building. Sarah, with exasperation and exhaustion, told me of all the bureaucratic and logistical issues she was facing.
I had ideas for each one and our conversation went for more than an hour. At the end we were both excited to meet. After sixteen grueling but also breathtaking inspiring days at Black Rock City, I turned around and flew off to New York City, on the Friday Sept 9th’s redeye.
I had no idea what would be needed, I had ideas for labyrinths, alters stairs for safe access but also I’d be happy to just stack chairs and greet people. what ever was needed to help create the event and help relieve the stress level of Sarah.
I arrived 4 days before the event at the address of an old exotic three story mansion. I’m staying on a couch in the attic. A group of us will be staying here, they have come from all over the world from other international sites of 36.5 performances. Sarah and I leave directly to the cove (as the locals call it). Sarah wants to stand at the North end of the beach but there is no safe access from that side. I had told her from our dusty FaceTime call that I believed I could make a safe way down to the beach. A bold statement, but it added a lot of calm to her world when I said it and calm is something she has little of as I realize very quickly there is a lot to take care of before the event
I believed we could manifest this. I did not know what I would find, I know these urban waters will have barnacle rip rap, old chunks of concrete, water worn red bricks. It’s an awkward climb over a rail and a slippery sandy slope to the beach. Glimmering in the low tide like the rock in the King Arthur story are pieces of 2” thick blue stone. The eroding hillside has just recently uncovered this treasure of flat thick heavy stone. I look at Sarah and I tell her— I can make this happen! By the end of the day there were a unique set of (safe) stairs that looked like they had been there for many many years. I add a place for alter gifts and low tide treasures. Locals stopped and all thanked me with so much gratitude.
Moving heavy stone too heavy to carry but just large enough to flip over and over using knees and fulcrum points, I was able to move up each stair and into place and was finished by sunset. The lights of the skyline came on and a group of youth who were friends of the cove and part of Sarah’s team all gathered at the south end of the cove. People shared poetry, dance, story telling, we gathered in a circle and introduced ourselves. I realized in this first moment that Sarah not only is creating a performance, she is creating a culture that allows those who participate to feel validated for who they are, and more importantly, who they want to be. I know this magical transformational place from the Temples we have built around the globe.
What a gift it is to land in this world where Sarah Cameron Sunde, with the help of so many people from 8 other global places, have created such a sacred event. I also must say how loved and validated I felt and how invigorating it felt to reciprocate that validation and love.
Yes, this was one of the most beautiful, inspiring projects I have ever been a part of. Yes, this is a cry for help to save our planet, a moment in our world of monumental existential crisis, but it was also a world filled with gratitude, inspiration, hope and joy. Yes big words, but feel my goosebumps, they are real.
I stop here… I will finish this as a longer more in depth as a small book, stay tuned my list of things to share is daunting but there is hope and joy in that fact.
