Choreographed by Phoebe Osborne ’18 and commissioned for Columbia University’s Year of Water. Featuring dancers Talya Epstein, Phoebe Osborne, and Lu Yim.
Hydra will take place rain or shine.
Hydra approaches water and its sociopolitical and environmental resonances with the poetics of precarity. A dance that considers the instability and malleability of water as a way of framing constant change, it proposes that our relationship to water—long a vehicle for connection and oppression—may now be reshaped through public performance.
The word hydra has many definitions: trouble that cannot be overcome by a single effort because of its many aspects, or due to its persistent and pervasive qualities; a minute and invertebrate aquatic animal with a tubular body and ring of tentacles around the mouth; and in Greek mythology, a many-headed, snake-bodied, immortal monster.
Hydra acknowledges the pervasive troubles of capitalism and colonialism that have led to the ravaged state of our earth and life within it, while reclaiming hydra as an empowering term for the queerly monstrous, many-headed, shapeshifting force that we are together.
Registration will open March 6, 2020. Please check back.