A tower of three conical speakers, created by sculptor Todd Laby, began to spin. Purcell’s opera aria “L’ascia Ch’io Piana” poured into our ears with each rotation of the sculpture as Sander hugged the plastic jug, made her way regretfully into a shoulder stand, and began to swing the vessel. Faith Elder, with her arresting blonde pixie cut, entered and fastened herself to the rigging, looked sharply at Sander, and started to spin. If my notes and memory serve, Sander then held out another rope, which Elder, after much reaching, finally grasped. As for the next part, I absolutely know it happened because I cannot forget the images: Elder spun faster, her body pouring itself into the loveliest and most angelic shapes, until at last she again simply hugged the jug.

As Rudolph told me in our pre-show interview, “This is sort of my water decade;” she is also currently choreographing a site-specific work for a secret waterfall location in Ireland, and working on another water-related project with the Bay Area’s Indigenous Ohlone tribe. The penultimate page of the program for “Water Moves” offered a list of “Water Statistics,” building to a grim science-supported glimpse of the future: “By 2050//water scarcity increases/Glaciers melting/Rivers no longer reach the sea/Groundwater depleted/faster than it returns.” Despite that program page, I have to confess, I had a hard time delving deeper into what the four sections of “Water Moves” had to say about its subject, other than the general idea that water is crucial and connecting and should be treated reverently. Perhaps that in itself is plenty to say. Or perhaps I was too fixated on how the plastic jugs reminded me of a children’s sermon I once witnessed in an Episcopal church, the purpose of which was to illustrate the holiness of water, but all through the sermon I could not thinking about all the damage plastics are doing to the water supply, and I wondered why the preacher hadn’t used tap water in a glass—was Rudolph aiming for a similar dissonance?