5 - Daring, dissolving and dancing: making communities with water

Summary

Introduction

This chapter focuses on a local iteration of an international event directed at dancing for safe water for everyone: Global Water Dances (GWD). In contextualising this large-scale project (over 100 sites participate globally), this chapter considers the ways in which communities form and dissolve on local and global scales, shifting the traditional boundaries of linear narratives of success which have led to this extraordinary era of crises, including climate crises. The event allows us (a collective of children, teens, students, artists and academics) to express our concerns about water rights which began in response to particular protests around austerity and water rights current in Ireland but also allowed us to connect this water-rich and overflowing country to global water rights issues. Our aim was to think and move with water and each other and to contribute to a shifting sensibility about water as central to issues of social justice as much as an issue of environmental concern. Thinking through movement as a fundamental quality of water and using images and accounts of a direct experience of water from somatic training and practices, this chapter seeks out the dynamics of fluid bodies on the move. This fluid framework shifts understandings of the ways in which communities are integrated or disintegrated by foregrounding how community is understood as fluid, with processes in need of ongoing regeneration and reinvention. In attending to how we move together in time, how we dare a mingling of selves and others, local and global, this chapter aims at reframing our understanding of age, time and place, allowing for a playful remembering of our responsibilities to our environments and each other.

Waterways and water works

Community is a fluid word and yet becomes a placeholder for many aspirations, hopes and dreams. Too often reality falls short or worse becomes an increasingly threatening nightmare. Youth also is fluid even as we mark time and have certain expectations of what might be around the next birthday corner (be it developmental milestones or social, financial, career achievements or declines). This edited collection draws on the possibilities for thinking through youth and community development together with an invitation to consider the radical and the root-based work of change.