I first met many of my relatives in a tunnel underneath Lincoln Center Theater. They had been watching the matinee of Comedy of Errors and recognized me, a long lost cousin, on stage. After the final bow, I got out of costume and headed out the tunnel only to find a mob of strangers blocking my way. A small women stepped out of the crowd and said, “We’re your cousins,” to which I said, “I don’t have any cousins.”
Luckily, I was wrong. Now I have a slew of wonderful relatives and I see that small woman, my cousin Karen Bradley, and her husband Richard Bell every week on Zoom meetings for Citizen Joy.
Karen and Richard live in rural Nova Scotia after long and vibrant D.C.-based careers in dance and politics respectively. Water is a big issue in their small town, Musquodoboit Harbour, and it is now a big theme in both of their work.
Last year they helped put in a community well, a lifeline when a severe drought dried up many private wells in Musquodoboit Harbour. Karen uses dance, specifically Movement Choirs, to help bring the community together around water and other local issues. She and Richard also helped create Global Water Dances, which “orchestrates multinational, community-oriented events to raise awareness of water issues and celebrate water through movement and dance.”
Richard edits the Eastern Shore Cooperator and recently started looking into water issues around data centers. He found that opposition to them is exploding, with recent protests in at least 125 locations across the United States and local jurisdictions stepping up with bans, more stringent zoning, and requirements that data centers provide their own water and electricity. Reuters now opines that “data center opposition is among the few issues uniting Americans across ideological lines.”
The future starts to look much brighter with community-based mutual aid (like the Musquodoboit Harbour well), community-based art (like movement choirs and global water dances), and community protests (like the ones against water-sucking data centers).
And water – water to share, water to dance with, water to fight for – may be a way to reconnect with your long lost cousins, and even find some flow with folks who swim in very different political waters.