INSIDE THE ARK
Click a letter to open a phase
ACKNOWLEDGE
ACTIVATE
REFINE
CEREMONY
CONTINUE
AARCC — Acknowledge, Activate, Refine, Ceremony, Continue — is a five-phase method for ecological and community-accountable performance research. Each phase is a compartment of one vessel an ark.
PHASE 1 · A
Acknowledge
In the ark: learning the waters before anything is built.
SCHOLARLY CONTEXT
Acknowledgment centers relational accountability. Before any score, workshop, or performance is imagined, the work begins by learning a site's histories, its environmental harms, and the ecomemory a community already carries, while naming the limits of the researcher's own position. The phase draws on Melanie Harris's ecowomanist call to honor lived experience, D. Soyini Madison's reflexive critical performance ethnography, and Rachael Sydney Knight's insistence that stewardship is inseparable from community authority. It asks who owns a story, what has been suppressed, and whether the research should proceed at all.
IN PRACTICE
Acknowledgment looks like conversation, oral history, shared reflection, and clear agreements about naming, access, and use. This could take form in monthly intergenerational gatherings with elders, artists, and knowledge keepers, or weekly dialogue circles. Documentation happens only with consent and agreed protocols, and acknowledgment does not end when the next phase begins; it continues throughout the whole process.
Reconnecting Currents: Limnol Memories — Shared offering on stage. 2024. Photo: Emily-Melissa Walker. Featuring Sierra Rosetta, Nora Alami and Marsae Lynette.
Reconnecting Currents: Limnol Memories — Cast and witness participants in dialogue before the performance. 2024. Featuring Sierra Rosetta, Nora Alami and Marsae Lynette.
Reconnecting Currents: Limnol Memories, 2024. Featuring Sierra Rosetta, Nora Alami, Marsae Lynette, and witness participants.
A METHOD · AN ARK
The AARCC Approach
AARCC (Acknowledge, Activate, Refine, Ceremony, Continue) is Marsae Lynette's original five-phase method for community-accountable performance research. Its name holds two images at once: the arc of a rainbow after a storm, and the ark a vessel from global diluvial tradition. The vessel built so that life, memory and song could cross the water and begin again. It is recursive rather than linear: a refusal, a new obligation or a new relationship can return the work to an earlier phase.
WHY AN ARK
Nearly every people who live beside water remember a flood, and in almost every telling something is built so that life can cross it. In Latin the word is arca, a chest: not a warship or a trading vessel but a container, sealed and set afloat, holding the seeds to plant a new world. AARCC takes that image as a method. Each phase is a deck of the vessel: what is gathered, what is carried, how it is cared for in transit, and where it comes to ground.
In these stories the vessel often comes to rest on a mountain, and the first act afterward is ceremony: a libation, an offering, a planting. The rainbow that follows is a symbol of peace after the storm. Together, arc and ark represent the rainbow's arc and the vessel that makes new beginnings possible.
VESSELS OF THE FLOOD
A vessel built for the crossing
Mesopotamia — Atrahasis is told to build a round coracle of reed and rope, sealed with bitumen, and to bring the animals aboard two by two: the oldest ark we can read, pressed into a clay tablet nearly four thousand years ago.
The Vedas — Manu ties his ship to the horn of Matsya, the great fish, who tows it through the deluge to the mountains so that the seeds of every living thing survive.
Anishinaabe (Great Lakes) — Nanaboozhoo and the animals cling to a great log; the small muskrat dives for a handful of earth, and the turtle offers its back to carry it. Turtle Island begins.
Yorùbá — Olokun, orisha of the deep, sends the sea over Ilé-Ifẹ̀; Ọ̀rúnmìlà climbs the golden chain and the waters are made to retreat so the land can be remade.
Taíno (Caribbean) — Yaya keeps the bones of his son Yayael in a gourd; when the gourd breaks, fish and sea pour out and fill the world. The Caribbean remembers its own origin of the waters.
Hawaiʻi — Nuʻu builds a great canoe with a house upon it and rides the flood to the summit of Mauna Kea, where Kāne descends on a rainbow to accept his offering.
WHERE THE ARK IS NOW
The ark is afloat in Trinidad and Tobago
AARCC is being practised and refined in the field right now, through Lime & Parlay gatherings, dialogue circles, workshops and site-specific ceremony on the islands' rivers and shorelines. Follow the vlogs, photographs and field notes as the vessel moves from phase to phase.