Performing Oceanic Solidarities was a one-day event primarily for the participants of the 3 Masters programs at DAS Graduate School: Theatre, Choreography and Creative Producing.

It is also part of a bigger research project that is just beginning that the ATD Lectorate called Climate Imaginaries at Sea (2023-2025). The Research department at the ATD is a partner on this project in collaboration with HvA and the Rietveld, together with other partners including Villa Zapakara in Paramaribo, Suriname.

For the ATD Lectorate contribution to that project, we are exploring how to think about how the arts respond to the climate emergency and rising sea levels with an explicit awareness of the ways in which that topic cannot be addressed separately from discourses around racism, coloniality, and speciesism.

Performing Oceanic Solidarities is a first step into thinking through some of the themes together – through a listening session led by Rajni Shah and Carly Rose Bedford; a collective embodied reading of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs; and by an evening program of performance: the sound installation dissolution/ dis solution by Joy Mariama Smith and a virtual sharing of the Whale Whispering, aproject by Michaela Harrison.

Performing Oceanic Solidarities is being co-curated by rajni shah –a new tutor on THIRD (and Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Head of DAS and the Lector for the Academy of Theatre & Dance, and produced by Joy Brandsma and Marilixe Beernink. With special thanks to the pod hosts who will guide our encounter with Undrowned: Flavia Pinheiro, Mikki Stelder, Isis Andreatta; Annick Kleizen; Ainhoa Hernández Escudero; Venuri Perera; and Janne Igbuwe.