Directed by: micha cárdenas, Gerald Casel, Ian Costello, Cynthia Ling Lee, Susana Ruiz, Huy Truong
How do we move through the loss of people, places, and even our own capacities due to COVID-19 and climate crisis? Oceanic responds to this question and to the urgent need to build new queer and trans BIPOC worlds of disability justice and climate justice.
Oceanic: Queering the Ocean presents images of three dancers as ghosts moving through time and space: both on Natural Bridges Beach (on Amah Mutsun land colonized as Santa Cruz, California). Queer, crip Chicanx feminist Gloria Anzaldúa evoked the millennia of geological transformation at Natural Bridges in her earliest efforts to include trans women in women of color feminism. The dancers’ movements were also inspired by Tiffany Lethabo King’s theorization of shoals as disruptions to colonial systems of knowledge.
Recent floods in California portend imminent sea level rise, and 95% of the kelp in Northern California has been destroyed by ocean acidification. As we mourn our losses, here and elsewhere, Oceanic, Portal proposes that we make space for healing and transformation, centering one another’s access needs to build worlds together.