Lost at Sea with Puddles and Sunny

Puddles the Pelican is a broken scrappy one-eyed bird of a cabaret singer, who lives on a Cruise Ship at the end of time. A survivor of the Deep Horizon Oil Spill, Puddles sings, squawks, moans and tells stories of love and loss to keep the cruise ship passengers awake, as they sail towards a howl, blind, eternal and empty, on a sea that is no longer blue but a rusted dark orange. Choking on bits of tar, flailing all fantastic Puddles quacks: “Once a glorious bird, now covered in oil, which one of you Bitches has a match?”

Puddles the Pelican is paying homage to a political legacy of drag. Every joke , every cringe worthy moment of silence every tear shed on stage is an effort to reciprocate with a queer community to weave trauma, loss, non-belonging while walking through the swamp and moving onwards the clearing, The show addresses many socio- political issues of our time and we repeatedly get feedback from people that not only does it create a video in their minds from start to finish, but that some of the songs sung and the jokes made, help people to work through their overwhelming existence, help them to get home tonight. This performance is in service of the community in means of a connection-hub for simultaneously mourning and celebrating the complicated now.

Created & performed by: Jeremy Wade
Production Witch, Video Animation & Artistic Support: Darcey Bennett Piano: Quentin Tolimieri
Texts: Allison Wiltshire & Jeremy Wade
Dramaturgy: Maika Knoblich
Artistic Mentor: Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy
Costume: Claudia Hill & Josa Marx
Make Up: –
Wig: Benjamin Kiss
Lights: Matthias Rieker
Live Audio Engineer: –

Special thanks to Michael Rollnick and Yoav Admoni, to the incredible Ezra Green for the contribution of his poetry, to Hari Stojan for his feedback.

Puddles first appeared as part of “The Clearing”, a coproduction by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

‘Lost at Sea with Puddles and Sunny’ is a production by Jeremy Wade, in coproduction with Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Special thanks to Württembergische Kunstverein Stuttgart.

Jeremy Wade is the queen in service of Puddles the Pelican, “This bird has me working like a dog,” says he/him. Disruption, Excess, Hyper Vulnerability – Wade has made a name for himself as an extreme performer and performance maker. His works, also incorporating curation and social practice, are disturbing and thought-provoking: they revolve around queer and feminist strategies of world making, the relational ethics of care, neoliberal critique and the violence that social norms cause on bodies of difference. This practice runs through the body as an interface for reciprocal exchange with other bodies, a possibility space, where being different together becomes a platform for political imagination.

Quentin Tolimieri is a Berlin based composer, pianist and improviser. His work has been presented around the world and has been recorded on the Wandelweiser Records, pfMENTUM, Creative Sources, and elsewhere music record labels. He holds an MA in composition from The University of Southampton and a BFA in composition and piano from California Institute of the Arts, studying with, among others, Michael Finnissy, Michael Pisaro, and Joe Maneri.

Press about Lost at Sea: https://tqw.at/we-tell-ourselves-stories-in-order-to-live/