Me & My Whale
“…would you like to come back to mine for some krill?”
Sound takes centre-stage alongside a misanthropic submarine captain who falls in love with a whale. Wandering alone in the deep ocean, she gathers sounds from the wreckage of a drowned human world. While submerged, she hears a whale’s song, deep and resonant, and dives to join her. But can it last?
Me & My Whale is a new performance project that calls out the damaging way we appropriate the sounds of the ocean using an absurdist blend of techniques from sound art, contemporary theatre and new music.
Featuring two performers, one submarine captain, the deep ocean, underwater singing, motion capture, generative programming, human-computer interaction, improvisation, a love song to cetaceans (both toothed and baleen), and one very lonely whale.
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“Moving, humorous and highly original”
– NARC. Magazine
“An eerie, sonic fairy-tale… hauntingly beautiful”
– Newspaper Taxi
“spans moments of abstract, sonically scored movement, and joyful silliness”
– James Varney
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Created by aquatic apes and all round weirdos Xavier Velastin and Hannah Mook.
Me & My Whale was developed and is supported using lottery funding by Arts Council England, with the support of The Vaults, The HopBarn, stage@leeds, Royal Exchange Theatre, Live Art Bistro, Goldsmiths, University of London. We are grateful for the rehearsal and performance space provided by stage@leeds, The HopBarn, Partisan Collective, East Street Arts, CHUNK, and Z-arts.