Reach

2020
film

Tags: Film, Dance & movement, Poetry, Ritual / Ceremonial practice, Social justice, Ecological kinship, Collaboration

I created the movement film Reach in close collaboration with medicinal poet and artist Niema Lightseed. The work unites Niema’s medicinal poetry with imagery of the river, old-growth forest, and embodied presence, weaving language and movement into a meditation on rest, resilience, and liberation.

The poem, inspired by the visionary work of Tricia Hersey (The Nap Ministry) and adrienne maree brown (generative somatics), honors the lineage of struggle against colonization while insisting that true survival requires rest, dreaming, and trust in the life moving through us. I aimed to amplify Niema’s words, situating them within elemental landscapes where water, trees, and sky mirror human longing for freedom and connection.

Viewers described the film as calming, profound, and hauntingly beautiful—a work that restores, reconnects, and feels like “a holistic injection toward remembrance of our innate being.”

The film was publicly screened in 2020 and continues to circulate as a poetic invocation of Black liberation, ecological kinship, and cooperative survival in revolutionary times.

About the collaborator:

Niema self-describes:

“I belong to poetry, to painting, to music, to all art. I belong to the tall trees and still-wild rivers, to the dandelion, lavender, and salmon. I belong to the wisdom of the healing body and the relationship between touch, movement, and wellness. I belong to a liberated, creative, and interconnected future. I am a Black, fat, cis-woman originally from the lands of the Neshnabé people in what is now called Chicago, Illinois. Since 2013 I have been a grateful guest in the lands of the Tsinook, Multnomah, and Kalapuya people in so-called Portland, Oregon. My life and my offerings are a blend of ancient traditions and modern explorations, medicine distilled from an irrepressible inquiry into the marrow of life. I want to meet the rock that became the paint that flows from brush, literally and metaphorically in all we create. I am a lifelong student of liberation in an ever-deepening process of learning how to transform internalized white supremacist heteropatriarchal oppression, dismantle capitalism, and serve our collective evolution towards an equitable, regenerative, and truly healthy world, guided by creativity and radical imagination.”