King Tide: Shoreline: A Site-Specific Dance and Music Performance About Water and Climate Change For All Ages

King Tide: Shoreline: A Site-Specific Dance and Music Performance About Water and Climate Change For All Ages

King Tide: Shoreline is a site-specific dance performance about water and climate change. Our performance explores the fragility and resilience of local watersheds and the shoreline. We ask: What can we learn about climate change from balances and extremes in our bodies, our movement, and our relationship to the shoreline?  King Tide: Shoreline premieres at the Hayward Regional Shoreline in May and June with six free, site-specific performances of dance along a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of preserved Bay wetlands. Audiences will be immersed in both cinematic vistas and intimate experiences of water, air, earth and sun, followed by refreshments and community conversations about climate change. 

King tides are extreme tide patterns that take place in winter when the sun and moon pull water across the earth in opposite directions. Artistic Director Nina Haft consulted the Farmer’s Almanac, local tide charts and other sources to develop this dance performance. King Tide: Shoreline explores how natural forces shape our movement, and how we might cultivate better responses to changes in our natural world. 

The choreography in King Tide: Shoreline is wild and poetic, and entirely created in dialogue with the tides, the weather and the coastline.

Part One is called MARSH. Guided by Shoreline Center naturalists, audiences hike in from the parking lot to the water's edge, encountering dancers embedded throughout the landscape, at times resembling birds camouflaged in the mud and grasses of the fragile wetlands. MARSH is inspired by cyclical patterns and bird movement and by subtle, incremental changes in nature.

Part Two is called MYTHOS. We draw inspiration here from the body as resilient and vulnerable terrain. We dive into the ancient Greek myth of Thetis, the goddess who dipped her son Achilles by the ankles in the river to protect him from the ravages of war, yet forgot that her grasp would leave his heel untouched by the healing powers of the water. This section of the work takes place on a footbridge spanning an outlet of the San Lorenzo Watershed into the San Francisco Bay. MYTHOS explores exposure, vulnerability, and our efforts to shield future generations from natural disasters or climate change. These dances can be witnessed up close and also from great distance, in a form of live cinema.

Part Three is called MIGRATION. We return to the beachhead, where sand, surf and washed up debris shape movement phrases and our ability to connect.

Part Four is called MOUTH. This coda resembles a surrealist tea party. The dancers alight on a bench, where questions about climate change, choice and futility swirl like a mounting wind.  This quicksilver section segues into a promenade of audience and performers back to the Shoreline Center, where we will share tea and a post-performance conversation about the performance, water, and climate change.

King Tide: Shoreline runs May 29, 30 and June 5, with shows each day at 12 noon and 6:00pm.  All performances begin at the Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center, 4901 Breakwater Avenue, Hayward, CA  94545, and progress along a two-and-a-half mile loop of the Bay Coast Trail. Audience members should come dressed for wind and variable temperatures, and for a 90 minute walk on level ground.