Get your tickets for Sea Change Within Us HERE!
Hosted by Earthlab and the Washington Sea Grant, and sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Karin Stevens Dance presents again Sea Change Within Us, on May 28th at 4:00 pm at Gould Hall, University of Washington. Sea Change Within Us is a revival and recreation of a 2019 collaborative work, and was recently performed at the Olympic Sculpture Park PACCAR Pavilion in collaboration with the Seattle Art Museum and at Gonzaga University. In a time of deep social and environmental fracture, Sea Change Within Us offers artists, scientists, environmental activists, students, and communities a rare, full-bodied experience that transforms climate knowledge into equity-centered dialogue, interdisciplinary learning, and shared presence, care, and responsibility.
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 listen to 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.