Vertical Divider
|
Sandra Paola López Ramírez
|
"I was recently asked about why I focus my current work on water.
The obvious part of my response is that water is life. All living beings in Mother Earth depend on water; we need it for our spiritual, emotional and physical wellbeing and survival. Perhaps the less obvious, is the recognition that water is alive. As one of the living elements on this Earth, water has spirit, agency and memory.
Guided by my spiritual teacher, the “taita” Muisca Tigua Nika Sua, my journey of reconnection to Spirit has led me to use my body and my gift of dance to deepen my relationships to more-than-human nature and Mother Earth. Sharing this process with my students at UTEP, and with the El Paso del Norte community is my current mission.
Therefore, for me, Gathering for Water - in addition to a dance festival - is an urgent call to action, a beautiful honoring song, and a collective celebration of our relationship with water."
The obvious part of my response is that water is life. All living beings in Mother Earth depend on water; we need it for our spiritual, emotional and physical wellbeing and survival. Perhaps the less obvious, is the recognition that water is alive. As one of the living elements on this Earth, water has spirit, agency and memory.
Guided by my spiritual teacher, the “taita” Muisca Tigua Nika Sua, my journey of reconnection to Spirit has led me to use my body and my gift of dance to deepen my relationships to more-than-human nature and Mother Earth. Sharing this process with my students at UTEP, and with the El Paso del Norte community is my current mission.
Therefore, for me, Gathering for Water - in addition to a dance festival - is an urgent call to action, a beautiful honoring song, and a collective celebration of our relationship with water."
"In the past two years, we as dance faculty members at UTEP, in collaboration with researchers and wisdom-carriers from other fields and contexts, have shared dance and body-based experiences with our UTEP students and the frontera community to more deeply and more consciously connect to the presence and relevance of water in our lives and in our region.
When we connect the liveliness of our embodied experience to the presence and liveliness of water, we can rediscover our sense of shared responsibility towards the value of water in our interconnected lives on our planet.
Gathering for Water is a celebration of such a collective and creative process, a tribute to the role water plays in our lives, a mobilization of our bodies to reclaim a livable and sustainable partnership between humans and natural sources."
When we connect the liveliness of our embodied experience to the presence and liveliness of water, we can rediscover our sense of shared responsibility towards the value of water in our interconnected lives on our planet.
Gathering for Water is a celebration of such a collective and creative process, a tribute to the role water plays in our lives, a mobilization of our bodies to reclaim a livable and sustainable partnership between humans and natural sources."