ALL US GIRLS HAVE BEEN DEAD FOR SO LONG
Kathy Acker’s final published text, Eurydice in the Underworld, harnesses the Greek mythology of the heroic trip to hell; refocusing the story’s centre away from the male hero and onto the dead girl, who has been murdered by a snake. Katabasis refers both to a journey into the underworld, and a trip to the coast. In times of climate crisis, hell – the realm of the dead, the scorching, the boiling, the rotting – is also situated at the sea, as waters heat, melt and rise.
First performed in 2019 at the ICA, London, All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long is a low-fi musical extravaganza flowing between beach and underworld, animating the animal, alien, and abject actors in our current climate apocalypse – most notably Ecco the Dolphin, who has lost their pod and must (like Eurydice, Orpheus and so on) travel deep beneath both time and space to rescue their missing and possibly dead kin.
An online apocalypse version of the play was also performed on Zoom as part of TALOS: Science Fiction Theatre Festival of London in 2020 during the Covid pandemic.
In 2021 we Published the illustrated script with Arcadia Missa Press, which was launched as part of our exhibition extension of the project, The Way is Hard but Not Insoluble at Kelder, London.
This isn’t quite a happy ending: in the relentless tussle between toxicity and inviability on the one hand, and singing, queer fucking and fighting—in other words, multispecies irrepressibility and resistance—on the other, neither wins out. It’s as if the two sides are intertwined; co-constitutive, even. In All Us Girls Have Been Dead For So Long, like irl, things are severely fucked up; but as long as some of us are still playing, game isn’t over. There better be hope in that.
- Isabel Waidner [the greatest writer around], 2021, from the introduction to the published script
All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long with introduction by Isabel Waidner, 2021, paperback. London: Arcadia Missa Press.**** BUY THE BOOK*****
The Way is Hard but Not Insoluble at Kelder, 2021
Ecco was first performed at No Matter 2 in Manchester, 2019
'echo / ecco': conference paper/performance at London Conference in Critical Thought 2024. University of Greenwich
