Whal(ing)
About
workshop facilitated by Celeste Combes, in collaboration with Nicole Bettencourt Coelho, at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, 2020.
Whales swim
Humans dance
All dance
My skeleton dismantles
Expands towards yours.
This movement and voice workshop will be shaped as a ritual to connect with the whales.
Giant beings, guardians of the ocean,
How can we contact you through the channels of our bodies?
We will listen to your songs and sing back to you.
Inspired by what we know of your submarine culture, we will play games to rediscover our communication with each other. We will experiment with echolocation.
Through dance, we will dive deep into our body memory, looking for the genetical thread that weaves us to our seamates.
We will spend time preparing a dance intervention at the Natural History museum, in honour of the blue whale skeleton.
This dance flashmob is programmed on the Saturday following the workshop.
In the late 20th century, only 400 blue whales had survived industrial whaling. The massacre of our 3 million years old ancestors needs to be taken in, and breathed in consciously.
Dance and singing can help us embody the interspecies trauma and heal the wound between whales and humans.
