Developed after my own experience with Long Covid, this performance explores the fragile connection between human breath, neurological sensitivity, and the acoustic lives of whales. It translates invisible experiences of illness and ecological distress into shared sensory and emotional encounters through storytelling, music, and silence.

The performance moves through intertwined worlds: the buzzing, tide-shifting life of a tidal pool—where hermit crabs carve out homes in found shells, hot-pink starfish cling to rocky edges, and a gray whale lies stranded on the beach—and the inner landscape of a young woman in Berlin grappling with Long Covid. A story passed down for thousands of years—of a raven trying to guide his whale-friend back to the ocean—becomes a mythic frame for her own struggle to find breath, balance, and orientation. As the city’s soundscape becomes unbearable, her world shrinks into darkened rooms, echoing the disorientation, overwhelm, and sensory fragility experienced by marine mammals navigating an increasingly noisy ocean.

The work grew out of a 2024 research fellowship from the Berlin Senate for Culture, with fieldwork on La Gomera (Spain) alongside Oceano, a responsible whale-watching and marine-education organisation that collaborates with M.E.E.R. e.V. on long-term cetacean research. Additional interviews with scientists, local communities, and people living with Long Covid in Berlin revealed parallel struggles with sound, disorientation, and the search for coherence.

Autobiographical storytelling, live vocal composition, and the traditional tale of the Raven and the Whale intertwine to ask how care and orientation can be rediscovered when rhythm is lost.

An excerpt was presented at the Feuerspuren Storytelling Festival in Bremen (November 2025). The full-length premiere will take place at Theaterforum Kreuzberg, Berlin, in April 2026. It will include accessible formats such as  a low-stimulation “lying-down performance” in a darkened, quiet space for those who need to attend in a reclined position. Updated information will be available here.