echo / ecco

In Summer 2019, Linda Stupart and Carl Gent debuted All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long, a feature-length musical play that populated the narra-ve structure of the 1990s Sega MegaDrive video game Ecco the Dolphin with a host of other protagonists including Kathy Acker, Naomi Klein's reportage of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Margaret Cavendish's 1666 proto-scifi novel The Blazing World, and Westlife's cover of Seasons in the Sun. The play took the narrative structure of katabasis – a roundtrip to Hell (or the coast), present in all of these tales, and used them to tell a new tale of emancipatory climate collapse. During All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long Virgil B/G
Taylor played the role of ECCO the Dolphin. At several points in the play ECCO has to use her echolocation skills to find, variously, its pod, a song and The Woman. Taylor did this by screaming at various props onstage and into the audience. We spent a lot of -me thinking about echolocation – how dolphins and their kin see not just the surface of objects or their families but their insides too. Dolphins know when a fellow dolphin is sick, ecstaic or distressed, can witness a tumour, a chemical imbalance or an arousal in its earliest stages, possibly before a host animal would do themselves. The dolphin world of broadcast and broadcast-receiving is con-nuous, porous, without shame, without
the ability to conceal certain types of informa-on among a pod. Thinking about echoloca-on as a life of broadcast-in-praxis and radical openness, we foreground this in a new updated two-person performance, working as a pod and using sound and song to forge connec-ons between bodies that were otherwise disinct in the non-sonic world.