All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long

In this low-fi musical extravaganza – which flows between beach and underworld – Carl Gent and Linda Stupart animate the animal, alien, and abject actors in our current climate apocalypse. Most notably Ecco the Dolphin, who has lost their pod and must (like Eurydice, Orpheus and so on) travel deep beneath both time and space to rescue their missing and possibly dead kin. As our boat rocked in that terrible place – the sky buzzing with Black Hawk helicopters and snowy white egrets – I had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage. – Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, 2014 Deep within a number of stalks, the water is rising up from the bottom; the marsh is mucking and rising, thickening dead fish skins; theres no need to come when everything is sparse, thick and sparks; i come fast. – Kathy Acker, Pussy King of the Pirates, 1996. Acker’s final published text, Eurydice in the Underworld, harnesses the Greek mythology of the heroic trip to hell; refocusing the story’s centre away from the male hero and onto the dead girl, who has been murdered by a snake. Katabasis refers both to a journey into the underworld, and a trip to the coast. In times of climate crisis, hell – the realm of the dead, the scorching, the boiling, the rotting – is also situated at the sea, as waters heat, melt and rise. Only a fool will now attempt to stop us girls. To halt our ecstatic singing. The death of season isn’t blackness, but another kind of light.

Part of TALOS IV Sci-Fi Festival