How to Get to the River is a research-based art adventure that invites participants to develop an embodied, creative, and loving understanding of and attunement to the Schuylkill River watershed. The work is made by artist Janani Balasubramanian in collaboration with Whit MacLaughlin and Pete Angevine of Philadelphia theater company New Paradise Laboratories.

It is an investigative walk that unveils the watershed’s bustling dynamism in a neighborhood immediately adjacent to the Academy of Natural Sciences, taking you down Cherry Street to the Schuylkill River and back. Follow visual cues, trail blazes, embedded sound experiences and other surprising moments that treat this urban watershed as a work of art. Become attuned to the evidence of water flow as it is imprinted on our urban landscape, noticing how it is channeled to the ground, courses across sloped roofs, gushes through rain gutters and splashes into underground storm drains. A serpentine clarinet fugue performed by British composer Shabaka Hutchings accompanies the journey.

The walk culminates at the Schuylkill with the sound installation Inside the Watershed, a live composition created by environmental sound artist and composer Annea Lockwood and interactive sound artist Liz Phillips.