The piece uses choreographed dance as well as a choreographed journey by the audience through the Hunts Point neighborhood. What is this journey like? 

The piece is definitely a journey, both in the making of it and in the experience that the audience has. The audience arrives at Joseph Rodman Drake Park where the burial ground is located. In the park, the space is activated: We share fragments—because that's really all that we have—of the archive. With the exception of a small sign that indicates that it's a burial ground, there's really no other clear sign. In the center, there's a cemetery where the people who enslaved people are buried—the Hunt, Leggett, and Willett families—and that's clearly labeled with a fence, but on the hill where the African burial is, there's no indication that anything is there.

 We say the names of the people that we know to be buried there. The audience is each given a flower, and we cocreate an altar in their honor at that site. 

 We then travel through the park in a procession, and there's movement and song. There, we encounter a character called Trickster, who's our tricky guide on this journey. 

 We travel about a block through the area singing, dancing, storytelling, and the audience is invited to participate. Then, the audience gets on a bus led by Trickster and we arrive at another park. 

Is there a final destination? 

Trickster is on a journey to find the water. We do find it at the second location, Hunts Point Landing, where we encounter more song and dance and storytelling. At that site, we are also able to see Rikers Island as well as Vernon Bain Correctional Center, also known as “The Boat.” Until recently, “The Boat” was operating as a floating jail. A really important aspect of this work is to bridge together these connections between the past and present and to see how the present moment is in conversation with the past. How do we continue to live with “the afterlife of slavery,” as Saidiya Hartman calls it? 

What is the significance of water, both for Trickster as well as in your title? 

I practice Buddhism, and there is an idea of “the wave and the water.” We think of a wave as something that has a beginning, middle, and end, while the water just is. In thinking about the course of history, we think that things happen chronologically, but also that we are deeply connected and interconnected with the past and with the future. All of these things exist together at the same moment. 

Trickster has an antagonistic relationship with the water because it's in this journey [across the water] that a lot has been taken from us. This character is thinking about the water as an entity that has robbed a piece of themselves [the Trickster is referred to using they them pronouns]. In this journey, Trickster is talking about all the things that they're going to do to the water and how they are going to take back what's been taken from them by the ocean. As they get closer, we also see parts of their story that they've tried to hide that have been too painful. 

The title is playing with that idea of time as a way to reconcile these painful histories. Through the healing of ourselves, we are healing ourselves and our ancestors and our future generations.