Sea Change Within Us | October 19 at 12pm and 4:30pm, at SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park, PACCAR Pavilion. Free Tickets.
In partnership with the Seattle Art Museum, Karin Stevens Dance presents Sea Change Within Us, a revival and recreation of a 2019 collaborative work, October 19, 12 & 4:30 pm at SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park PACCAR Pavilion. With 2025 Hope Corps funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, these FREE performances are part of Mayor Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan. Sea Change Within Us, by Karin Stevens Dance, is a sixty minute performance addressing local Washington state water concerns and climate change consequences through the voices of real people we interviewed, combined with moving rigid structures of water images by dancing human bodies.
Eight dancers move four panels into dynamic configurations to express concerns about rivers and dams, endangered species, ice, ocean and sea-level rise, flooding, migration, Indigenous fishing rights, injustice, divisive politics, and human dis/re/connection. Within these turbulent thematic layers, grief is addressed through the real sounds of mother orca Tahlequah’s cries in the “Rivers, Dams, Salmon, Orca” section. Collective awareness is awakened in the section “Descending Pressure” with the repeated phrase from a climate activist-artist, “Our bodies are a source of wisdom.” Throughout difficult content there is contemplation and beauty to support the felt-urgency of our crises. Finally, the performance encourages unification with our ecosystems. As a message to disrupt a myopic, singular view point, the audience is invited to view the work from all four sides and participate in a simple, guided embodied movement practice to re/connect to a whole-bodied relationship with water and the ensuing performance. The project was conceived, directed and choreographed by Karin Stevens, with original sound compositions by Kaley Lane Eaton and Jessi Harvey, and large-scale installation by Roger Feldman. For the 2025 project, we commissioned former Seattle Civic Poet Jourdan Imani Keith to write an original poem for part of the recreated 2025 sound score. The sound score includes electronic and acoustic recordings: an original commissioned score with string quartet by Harvey; electronics and sounds from Eaton’s great-great-great-grandparent’s piano that traveled by raft up the Missouri River woven with voices from 2019 interviews conducted through our collaboration with journalist Devi Lockwood’s 1,001 Stories on Water and Climate Change. Eaton with support from Sam Strawbridge layer new 2025 interviews conducted by Karin Stevens and the commissioned poem by Keith into recreated sections of the original sound score.
Visit HERE, to read and listen to the poem by Jourdan Imani Keith.
Visit HERE, to listen to new 2025 interviews from all over Washington State.
Visit the interactive map of 1,001 Stories on Water and Climate Change to hear the full interviews from
2019 Seattle voices, HERE.
Special thanks to the Seattle International Dance Festival James Ray Residency & Touring grant
and Gonzaga University for the impetus to revive this work by inviting us to bring it to the
University’s campus for a residency September 14-19, 2025. We culminate the residency with two
performances on September 19th for the public schools and for the general public at the Myrtle
Woldson Performing Arts Center. We are thrilled about this partnership and collaboration with
the Dance Department, Humanities professors and the Institute for Climate, Water and the
Environment!
The recreation of this 2019 project is funded by ArtsWA, National Endowment for the Arts, Seattle Office
of Arts & Culture/Hope Corps, Earth Creative, and 4Culture.