June 12, Gather at 2pm, Parade at 3pm

Teardrop Park, Battery Park City
Enter at North End Avenue or River Terrace

Kicking off the 2022 River To River Festival, MURMURATIONS is a visual symphony, a puppet poem in public space, a performative conversation with New York Harbor.

Through puppetry, participants are invited to experience the wonder, fragility and history of New York’s waterways from multiple viewpoints—as puppeteer, as audience, as fish, as micro-plastic trash—to experience human impact on the earth through a non-human lens and inspire connection and stewardship through “murmuration,” the term used to describe the miraculous phenomenon of very large groups of birds, fish or insects moving together.

Materials for the performance will be sourced directly from New York City waterways. In this time of climate change and extinction, MURMURATIONS looks to the wonder hidden beneath the surface of the river as an invitation to take collective action, to listen, to radically love, and to murmurate. By activating public space with sound, movement and pageantry, what was once trash becomes living sculpture and offers a pathway into a universe of joy, justice and queer possibility.

Presented in partnership with Battery Park City Authority