At 2:45 on a Sunday afternoon, Jaclyn Pryor is wearing a suit and a yalmulke, running down an avenue in Hyde Park. Eight white Volvos trail behind her. A squadron of brides—including at least one man—look to the sky and take off running from an adjacent front lawn, joining the procession. Passers-by stand and gawk. Inside each Volvo, Pachelbel’s Canon plays. It is a perfect moment.

floodlines, a site-specific, mobile performance piece put on once every year by Pryor and a small army of collaborators, is made up of several such perfect moments. Although it’s not always clear what they add up to in terms of story, they combine profoundly into a contemplation of place, community, loss, faith, and American tradition.

This year, we were lucky enough to ride behind Pryor on her annual lap through a Hyde Park of the imagination. We’d love to go on about all the sights and experiences crafted by the floodlines team, but we don’t want to ruin it for future participants—floodlines will be performed twice more, in 2009 and 2010, before its seven-year cycle is complete. In a post-show talkback, Pryor explained that she conceived the show with seven yearly performances to mirror the Jewish practice of sitting shiva, or mourning, for seven days.

A tone of grief does pervade floodlines, from the funeral procession tags on the Volvo windshields, to the wailing Sigur Ros on the car stereos, to the textual clues playing on the words “missing” and “falling.” Of course, September 11 comes to mind—and Pryor cites her experience in New York in 2001 as a catalyst for the piece. However, the show does not feel so much tied to history as alive to it. More recent referents like Hurricane Katrina and imminent ecological disaster resound just as powerfully.

More than anything else, for us, floodlines is about the neighborhoods that host it—Hyde Park and North University. In a sense, the neighborhoods are the show, and the prepared portions of floodlines just help us “see” them better. Some of our favorite experiences involved locals and joggers who stopped to watch the action and were somehow affected by it. A cast member later told us that at least one Hyde Park family has organically joined in the performative conversation, going out to their front yard the day of the show and staging a little perfect moment of their own.

floodlines is an art form unto itself, and one that only exists in Austin. Possibly, it couldn’t exist anywhere else. However, the clock is winding down—only two shows remain. Luckily, if you haven’t seen it yet, you’ve got a whole year to reserve your tickets to the next one.