The City of Alameda is joining forces with three of Alameda’s most prominent arts organizations—West End Arts District, RADIUM Presents, and Rhythmix Cultural Works—to present Rising Tides, a year-long series of arts experiences and performances that will culminate in the summer of 2025 with a photo exhibition entitled In Plain Site.
The series kicks off on Saturday, August 24, when Rhythmix Cultural Works presents Rising Seas, the first of their total of four contributions to the series. The free climate art event features live music, dance, visual art, and theater.
The Rising Seas event is about sharing the joys and concerns of living on an island amid a climate crisis through a day of public performances that includes the dramatic and propulsive Japanese taiko ensemble Maze Daiko, as well as SF Mime Troupe veteran, Ed Holmes, as “The Climate Detective from the Future,” will tell stories of Alameda’s waterfront past, present and future. The event is directed by Jeff Raz (formerly of Cirque du Soleil). Also performing is KT Nelson, the beloved Bay Area Izzy-winning Choreographer and former Co-Artistic Director at ODC Dance presenting her piece, Where do we draw the line?
The “big picture” idea behind the Rising Tides series is to harness the power of public art to connect with people and inspire action around climate change, not just on this earth, but more specifically, on the island of Alameda and surrounding Bay Area.
The idea of “a rising tide lifting all boats” gained popularity in the early 1960s when President John F. Kennedy used the aphorism to suggest that investing in economic development could benefit everyone who participates in the economy. Similarly, that is the ultimate goal of the Rising Tides series—to engage audiences to learn about climate change and invest in action.
Somewhere to Land
West End Arts District and BANDALOOP are collaborating on Somewhere to Land (dances for sea and low sky), a new piece that will premiere on September 26-28 at 7:30 p.m. (pre show 7 p.m.) at Alameda Point. BANDALOOP will bring their fabled vertical dance performing chops to this site-specific work, using the metal girders of Hangar 25 at the western end of Seaplane Lagoon as a vertical stage to explore themes of climate adaptation, rewilding, and sustainable development in alignment with the City of Alameda’s vision for the De-Pave Park project. Admission is free.
De-Pave Park takes the idea of rewilding and reclamation and makes it manifest by restoring natural habitat that transforms what is now dead tarmac into a thriving ecological home to migratory birds and floating wetlands. It is also a park designed to mitigate the carbon footprint of the original construction.
This vertical dance theater song cycle premiered in La Plaza de la Constitución in Santiago, Chile in January 2023, and came up the pacific flyway to the historic Fairmont Hotel in Los Angeles in February of that year. The songs and dances then migrated to the Sundial Bridge in Redding, California, in July 2024, and in September comes to Alameda as part of the Rising Tides series.
As part of BANDALOOP’s multi-year vertical dance theater migration, “FLOCK,” Destani Wolf and Ben Juodvalkis are composing a living multi-lingual song cycle around themes of bird migration and human migration. Wolf is a singer with Bobby Mcferrin’s Motion, performs with Cirque Du Soleil, and has multiple Grammy-nominated albums.Juodvalkis is a composer for BANDALOOP, Lines Ballet, Joe Goode Performance Group, and many others.
“Migratory birds, directed by ancient internal maps, inspire us to consider how our own personal migration stories may hold wisdom for us in how we navigate the ever increasing changes and challenges of environmental and social change,” says BANDALOOP Artistic Director Melecio Estrella,
Somewhere to Land (dances for sea and low sky) is a further distillation of work the West End Arts District’s Tara Pilbrow collaborated on with artistic director Melecio Estrella and his team in 2023. That work explored the spatial/technical possibilities of the structure and other notions including how the performance on the building by the dancers who seem to literally fly can represent its return to nature.
The Rising Tides project is supported by funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the City of Alameda.
