Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

That Darkened Mirror: Transforming Our Relationship With Water

In the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, written roughly in the 18th to 16th century BCE, Marduk, a storm god, tears apart Tiamat, a water goddess, and from her body creates the Earth. Her blood flows and pools in the hollows of her back, her thighs and breasts. Rivulets of the briny life-giving waters cut jagged edges and drop into chasms of the ossifying flesh. In the Judeo-Christian creation myth in Genesis, before there was light, God floats above the waters. In Egyptian mythology, the goddess Nun is reflected in the starry oceans of the sky. And in the field of evolutionary theory, lightning struck the oceans and somewhere in this early embryonic fluid a prokaryotic cell emerged.

Humankind throughout time has considered water its birthplace and seen our futures as intrinsically linked with it. Connected by a web of H2O, inhaling the same water vapour, we all share the same building blocks, which are constantly flowing, changing: all of the Earth’s atoms have been recycled and the molecules in our bodies are not the same as they were seven years ago. This principle of unity and change is expressed beautifully in the Suzanne Miller & Allan Paivio Productions performance, Thirst. Thirst was presented by the SPACE initiative here at Dawson on October 16, 2014. I attended with my Introduction to World Religions class, taught by Ivan Freud, and watched enthralled as the performers, Suzanne Miller and Magali Stoll, danced through the three states of water: solid, liquid, and gas.

Originally locked together in a tight embrace, the dancers begin as personifying ice, every movement creating a fissure in the hard surface. Moving apart and using props such as plastic sheets, Miller and Stoll created liquid water’s movement. Throughout the performance they used their bodies to become water, ending the performance in the gaseous state. Water retained its molecular formula, however, as the dancers were unchanging even in their different guises. The nature of the subject, in other words, transcended any change that it was subjected to. Entities that seemed entirely separate proved to be the same or at least moved according to the same principles.

An analogy can be made here to religion and science. For thousands of years in South-East Asia, practitioners of Hindu faiths have taught, "Atman is Brahman." To explain this simply, the individual soul is the universal soul. There is no spiritual distinction between you, me and the big blue sea. Or the Red and Black ones for that matter! Similarly, in physics there is the quantum reality. In quantum reality, we are all energy and connected by a field of energy. The separateness we perceive between each other and between ourselves and the planet is an illusion.

So what does this insight mean for our relationship with the environment, and more specifically, with water?

Let us take a closer look at Thirst first. As a whole the intent of the production is to raise awareness of both the miracle of water and the increasing scarcity of drinking water. A distinct theme in the performance is waste. There is a sequence when Magali Stoll continues her dance on the floor level and Suzanne Miller climbs up a ladder with a filled plastic water bottle. She takes gulps of the liquid, pauses, laughs and sprays it all over the stage from her mouth. The wasteful, drunken-like spectacle continues for several minutes, until the “bottle” (a metaphor for our planet) is emptied and Miller crumples and disposes of it. This scene contrasts with Stoll’s later sequence where she carefully, clinically measures out water with a syringe and offers audience members a portion. These scenes can be interpreted different ways, as can their relationship with each other. Miller’s performance can be interpreted as the present wastefulness in water-affluent countries (like Canada). We are drunk on water and are foolish for wasting such a precious resource. Simultaneously, the performance can speak of humanity’s destructive relationship with plastic. Perhaps Miller is in fact choking on the plastic, which is now in every water source in the world, including our oceans. (See recent Mission Blue documentary on Netflix.) Stoll’s performance can be the future of those wasteful countries or the present predicament of less fortunate ones where access to water is limited. Neither of these scenarios is ideal, to say the least: the first involves a problematic approach to water that will lead to a global calamity; in the second humanity may treasure water but only out of necessity, because of scarcity. As a whole, humankind must learn the value of all water.

The health of the oceans’ ecosystem is tantamount to humans. Here are some statistics to help that sink in:

16% of the world’s population relies on marine life for protein;
61% of the world’s GNP (Gross Domestic Product) comes from coastline areas;
70% of the Earth’s oxygen is produced by phytoplankton.

After you get over the fact that that environmentally zealous teacher in high school was wrong about trees producing the world’s oxygen, consider how this affects humanity’s relationship with water. We use water to water our gardens, nourish our livestock, for energy, to breathe and to thrive as a species. 60% of our body composition is water. Anything that we do to water, whether it is the source of Montreal’s drinking water or the Indian Ocean, we ultimately do to ourselves.   

We are bound together.

We are inter-dependent.

And we are co-creators of our future.

Let us gaze into the depths and find the mirror there.

Link to Thirst Dance Performance at Dawson

Photo credit: Francois Bergeron