One Island

One Island is a cross-Atlantic performance and exhibition that explores memory, migration, ecology, and the deep geologic and spiritual connections that link distant lands and peoples. Developed through two years of collaborative research and conversation, the work weaves sound, movement, and image to reflect on separation and kinship—on what it means to live across the fault lines of history and the shifting ground of the present.

"One Island celebrates the remnant Pangaeaic Central Mountains, starting from the Florida Keys, running along the Appalachians to Arcadia, crossing the Atlantic to Ireland through England into Morocco. This ancient spine reverberates with our connectiveness as well as our alienation, our history of enslavements and passages, our abandonments and homecomings. Of course, Pangaea was but a momentary gathering, not a starting point, a process of coalescing and separation.

This performance and exhibition seek those uneasy reconciliations, without easy erasures. Given the pandemic, current economic disruptions, wars, and racial divides, it is hard not to think of the tectonic plates drifting further and further apart. Indeed, in our Anthropocene Era, it is our human hand that has irreparably rendered new and terrible fissures. We believe these times require our imaginative gifts—to see them not in dread, but with love and respect—that celebrate our autonomy and that honor those islands within us. In our conversations over two years, we learned new, quieter ways of being attentive. We have become aware of those deeper under-waters, under-earths, where the spirits of the ancients reside, just beneath the surface. Our collaboration speaks to our own identities and our past, about the ghosts who watch us with great love, sometimes, and with indifference, sometimes.

Our intention is for the audience to be arrested by moments of beauty, by the voices of the dead, by the sounds of the birds flying overhead, and by the radio waves leading to distant and connected lands, through deep time and deep space.

In our mutual exploration of impossible reconciliations, we may come to moments of resolve and understanding, but they remain imperfect, contingent, partial, cloudy—some vague hum, a little static in the air."