Global Water Dance: Join the wave, make a splash

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WTVQ/Press Release) – Global Water Dances is celebrating its 10th year of connecting local and global water issues.

Lexington’s event will be held in Gardenside Park, 1835 Yorktown Road, on Saturday, June 12 from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. Dancers from across Lexington will perform at 2:30.

The event, sponsored by Motion Makers, is free and open to the public. Cosponsors include Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Dancers’ Studio, Watershed Watch in Kentucky, and Kentucky River Watershed Watch.

Bluegrass Greensource and the City of Lexington will offer educational activities. This
year’s dancers come from Dancers’ Studio, Sora Aerial Arts, and the Prime Time Dancers.

The biennial Global Water Dances is celebrating its tenth year of connecting local and global water issues with a full week of festivities and actions through Sunday July 13.

• June 9-11: Global Water Dances’ YouTube channel will show local-issue dances from around the world, including a submittal from Lexington’s Global Water Dancers, filmed in the Kentucky River Palisades area.
• June 12: Dances from the world over will be recorded and streamed.
• June 13: There will be two opportunities for participants to do synchronous sharing of the
Global Dance choreography via Zoom.

“Since we started in 2011, more and more people have been coming together to use dance to celebrate the fundamental importance of water in all our lives,” said Artistic Director, Vannia Ibarguen. “In 2019, over 180 sites on every continent except Antarctica streamed their events across the globe. And this year, we’re expecting more than 200 sites to participate.”

The founders of Global Water Dances believed that community-based dance performances could be a powerful non-verbal way to mobilize people to learn about the whole spectrum of water issues and to take action to protect access to safe drinking water. And with the Internet, it was possible to coordinate a sophisticated but inexpensive online production, both live and pre-recorded, that would allow people in all the performance locations to connect with each other.

“We have been so moved by the enthusiasm of so many to dance together and to share the stories of their local efforts to secure clean water for everyone, everywhere,” said Ibarguen. “We never could have predicted the commitment of the global dance communiKes to becoming a voice for agency and change that we see happening now.”