BLOODTIDE

BLOODTIDE is new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs.

It started as a play about a transqueer skeleton’s efforts to unsettle their marrow and learn to hear the moon. Then it became became a plan for a pageant exploring inter-species kinship, adaptation, and the threat of extinction. It morphed into a clown act probing modern human life and our current biomedical industry’s dependence on horseshoe crab blood. And became a way to use flag dancing to celebrate the Rufa Red Knots, a threatened shore bird that relies on horseshoe crab eggs to fuel one of the longest migrations of any bird on Earth. Bloodtide was finding form just as the pandemic hit. Loosing the opportunity to find it in the room with human collaborators, and gaining the opportunity to write and draw a book (thanks 3rd Thing Press!), Bloodtide now propels us through 450 million of years of lunar impulses to grapple with interlocking provocations around racial and climate justice, as a holiday proposal and manual for activation in a multitude of forms!  

Bloodtide attempts queer futurity, without mythologies of settler innocence, and with sustained recognition that time extends through our ancestors: recent ones, bog bodies, slithering fern dwellers and primordial beasts with telsons ruddering behind. It’s a holiday marking our relation to place and thus the necessity of making reparations and contributing to land return projects. Bloodtide promotes horizontalist structure building practices through pageantry, crabaoke (altered lyrics), naturedrag, cardboard sculpting, feasting and other hands-on locally oriented, commemorative & survivalist practices. Bloodtide posits that shared homage and attention to horseshoe crabs might further all repair efforts and other insufficient necessities for our collective and individual healing/ transformation.

BUY THE BOOK HERE (please and thanks!)

Send an email to 450millionyearsago@gmail.com to get updates about holiday conversations and activations.

Some artists and organizations I’ve been in conversation with about Bloodtide are:

  • Directors: Sarah Benson + Eugene Ma

  • Dancers/ Choreographers: Orlando Hernandez, Shavon Norris + Kei Soares Cobb

  • Thought partners: Una Chaudhuri (eco-theater scholar), Marco McWilliams (Black freedom scholar), James Rosato (horseshoe crabber), Lorén Spears (Narragansett artist, educator and Director of The Tomaquag Museum)

  • Musicians/ Composers: Matthew Schreiber, Jackie Coleman, Rachel Blumberg

  • Organizational partners: New Urban Arts, The Coastal Institute, and Movement Education Outdoors

PAST DEVELOPMENT: (note: Bloodtide was formerly entitled Blood Bag)

  • Reading at Brown University (2/2018) 

  • Workshop at the Flea Theater in NYC (3/26-4/3 2018) 

    • Directed by Anne Cecelia DeMelo

    • Choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly

    • Music by Matthew Schreiber + Jackie Coleman

    • Ensemble: Tommy Bernardi, Adam Coy, Darby Davis, Alice Gorelick, Liz Leimkuhler, and Audrey Wang

  • Barn Arts Collective in Maine (6/3-6/10 2018) 

    • Collaboration with Anne Cecelia DeMelo, Matt Schreiber, Emily Dix Thomas

I’ve also shared pieces of the project through lectures and exercises with RISD’s teen program and New Urban Arts’s Art Inquiry program, and at protests of the Liquified Natural Gas facility proposed for the Port of Providence. In June of 2019, I presented my horseshoe crab grappling at  ‘Becoming Porous: Performing with(in) Climate Chaos’ my working group at The Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro in Mexico City.


Photo Credit: Brendan Swift, Ellie Phillips and Wiki