REVIEW: Whalefall or Song to Dance with My Death, Teatro Volatil, Ed Fringe ★★★★

A singing bowl chimes and I confuse it for the church bells tolling – what a carefully selected venue. We are gathered here today, in St. Cuthbert’s Kirkyard, to celebrate the life of Bruna Longo, born 45 years ago, died today, her entire life held in that small dash between two dates. Or so Bruna Longo tells us, as she explains her need to transform her own death into a piece of theatre. Personally I’m not a fan of prologues, and if it wasn’t for the dusky graveyard setting, I’d be rolling my eyes impatiently at this delay. Patience is a virtue I’m still learning.

Longo sings as she leads us on a procession through St. Cuthbert’s Church, this is theatre as ritual, theatre as communal act; I already feel more bound to these strangers than before – even the group of Americans who were talking way too loudly amongst the graves. 

The stage is laid enticingly with a large mound of gravel trailing down the steps from the altar. I think of Antigone and Electra, the women made famous by their heroic mourning of death in Attic Tragedy. Longo emits a death rattle that shakes me to my core. I don’t want to know where she learnt to do that, has she been haunting hospital wards? Longo dies in front of us, describing each stage of her body’s decay – my A level biology teacher would love this.

As Longo sings another Portuguese mourning song, I resist the temptation to check my hymn book of English translations – I want to feel the song in the melody before I read what the words mean.  Just as this gentle meditation on death is beginning to close eyelids, Longo emits the kind of blood curdling shriek that gives that phrase it’s definition. I’m awake!

She beats her breast and I’m waiting for her to tear her hair out, to rip off shreds off her clothes in the fashion of paid, professional women wailers at Ancient Greek funerals used to do. She doesn’t go that far, but her performance is still the closest living thing to Ancient Greek mourners I’ve ever witnessed. My old English Lit lecturer would also LOVE this. Longo is giving us her whole body and soul.

She sifts through the pile of gravel for bones. Now she is archeologist, unburying the dead: fragments of bone so big I can only assume they must belong to a whale. In some Indonesian cultures, the body of the dead is not buried, but kept in the house for months, brought meals and cigarettes, dressed daily and talked to as though they were still alive, until there is enough money saved up for the multi-day funeral rites.

Longo’s main complaint within this meditation on mortality seems to be that our current culture does not allow enough time to grieve, or enough time to bury the dead. Amen to that. We are encouraged to shove the dead out of sight and out of mind as fast as possible, a refusal of our own mortality which traps us in a half-life. I’m thinking now of all those billionaires obsessed with immortality, terrified at the idea of their own non-existence. Cowards. Bruna Longo shows us what bravery is: to adventure into death. 

Longo never says the C word herself, but clearly it is Capitalism that has no time for the dead (beyond the consumption of funerary goods) because it has no time for un-productive citizens with no labour to exploit or resources to extract. 

As Longa waltzes with the whalebones (her braid is a paid actor) I can’t help feeling I am watching her dance with her own skeleton, her own spirit – this show gives you exactly what it promises on the tin. And I believe her when she says that in confronting her own death and the death of her father, she has never felt more alive. 

This could all be incredibly self-indulgent, but it is so interesting it manages not to be – until we hit the seventy minute mark. No Fringe show needs to be an hour and a half long. I am counting down the last twenty minutes until I am free to resume my own life among the living. Perhaps that’s the point – Longo forces us to sit with death longer than we are comfortable. Or perhaps she could use a more cut-happy director.

Whalefall or Song to Dance to My Death  is in equal parts scientific inquiry, funerary rites, anthropological case study, personal poetry, cultural tour, communal ritual, and performance art. It is definitely theatre. 

Longo bemoans the tragedy of our human condition, Homo sapiens sapiens – one who thinks and, unfortunately, knows that they are thinking. Me too, Bruna, me too. If only we could think less, and live more. 

A beautiful offering from Brazil, this show has whet my appetite to see what else the São Paolo Showcase has to offer us here in Scotland. 

Recommended Drink: Palm Wine, known locally as tuak or ballo, a drink deeply ingrained in the South Sulawesi Indonesian funeral rites of Rambu Solo. 

You can catch Whalefall or Song to Dance With My Death at Lindisfarne Room at St. Cuthbert’s Church from 10-27 August at 20:00 (90mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.