The water that fills our oceans also flows through our bodies—and across distant stars and planets. Moving through us and around us, water shapes how we live, sense, and imagine. What if water could teach us how to think, feel, and know?

Together with anthropologist Dana Burton, children ages 8–18 will dive into how water connects us to the cosmos and to one another. Through interactive storytelling, art, sound, and movement, participants will explore how microbes survive in deserts, how tides rise and fall with the Moon, and how comets brought water across the solar system—discovering that intelligence, or the ways we sense and understand the world, lives in the flow of water, the rhythm of tides, and the connections between all living and nonliving beings.

The afternoon concludes with a collaborative art project and a cosmic dance party by SCRAAATCH, celebrating our shared, watery connection to the universe and our understanding of it.

Credits:

We the Youth – Keith Haring Lecture Series invites children and their friends and families to meet luminaries who talk about ideas and social issues that are often left off of school curriculums. 

This series is supported by The Keith Haring Foundation in honor of Keith Haring who collaborated with children throughout his life and believed in art’s ability to create a more accepting society.

Water. Moves. Us., co-presented by Performance Space New York as part of the We The Youth: Keith Haring Lecture for Kids and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of the Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series explores the possibility that intelligence is not only of the mind, but emerges through planetary, cosmic, relational, and distributed systems—woven into the very dynamics that shape existence across scale. 

Previous We the Youth lectures include: