LUNG WATER Performance
WRITTEN X DIRECTED BY RUBY DONOHOE
A woman who devotes her life to swimming around the world wakes up in a tiny hotel room with a melting glacier and discovers that her lungs are filling up with the sea. Held in quarantine in a room overlooking the ocean, her journey is told through a series of video calls with a doctor, her mother, and her girlfriend. The central character’s reckoning with the complexities of survival, the self in love, motherhood, and the climate crisis unfolds alongside the audience’s own journey.
LUNG WATER is a surrender to the absurd and tender companionship of our own reflection in the world we perceive and our desire to both be one with our environment and extricate ourselves from it. In a torrential prayer to the beauty and rage of entanglement, the work skids through the spine of Western medicine, an elderly Buddhist Punk manifesto rally, a war declared against the sea, bodily invasions, avenged pilgrimages, and the perils of trying to sell something on Craigslist.
This brutal, dark comedy and hopeful tragedy is about a disappearing sea, a disappearing self, and where I end and you begin.