The Water Quality Chorus is an art-science community engagement project that transforms water quality sampling data into musical interpretation for songs to be sung in a public sing-along event at Northern Spark Climate Chaos/Climate Rising on June 10th, 2017 in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Through this project we seek to unite the community-building quality of sing-alongs with American storytelling traditions as a way to turn water quality data — which can seem to some to be abstract and opaque — into a sensory and emotional experience that communicates the urgent challenges facing our riparian habitats. Through art we aim to:
- Educate the public about water quality issues in Minnesota watersheds and challenges they face through a unique experience of singing and storytelling
- Recognize the efforts of citizen scientists and give them a new platform for public communication of their experiences and motivations
- Educate the public on ways of being involved in water conservation as citizen scientists, residents, and stewards and inhabitants of their local riparian habitats.
This is a year-long project beginning in Fall 2016 which involves the following:
- Water Support Groups: a series of storytelling events and recording sessions featuring stakeholders, policymakers, residents, and activists working on statewide water quality issues;
- Podcast archive of stories of water connection, crisis, resilience, and action
- Public choral performance and sing-along accompanied by choreography, video projection, a large-scale printed Water Quality Songbook an a series of oversized masks representing watery beings found in the Minnesota landscape
Project partners include:
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