If the Fish Could Speak

If the Fish Could Speak, by Neusa Dias

February 13 | 9:00 PM
Location: Lagos Cultural Center – Duval Pestana Auditorium
Organizers: Co.N125 – Companhia N125 and Lagos City Hall, with support from DGArtes/RTCP
Duration: 60 min
Age Rating: 12+
Tickets available at the CCL reception or via BOL

In a dystopian present, the polar ice caps have melted, the oceans have warmed, and water has expanded across the Earth’s landmass. Only the highest peaks of the Himalayas and the Andes emerge as scattered islands in a vast sea.

A water empire now covers the planet, echoing the story of an ancient punishment. Fish, mollusks, crustaceans, and other marine creatures have become the most abundant forms of life. They have mutated, adapted, and evolved.

They have developed the ability to speak—in a language that could be called human, filled with quotations and echoes of what they once heard and saw, and that, miracle or curse, has not been forgotten. They swim through entire submerged cities.

Astonished by the behaviors and attitudes of the beings who once inhabited them, they attempt to reconstruct the praise and reprimands they heard on a day in June, as if carrying in their bodies and voices the hope for a “new world.”

It is from this encounter between past and present, ruin and reinvention, animal and human, “us” and “them,” baroque opulence and the abyss of science fiction, that If the Fish Could Speak emerges: a performance on the threshold of theater, dance, and music, provoking “confusion”—or perhaps “repair”—through the unsuspected voice of the fish.