description
“Do rate our performance on the way out, it’s the green button, you assholes,” says Puddles, a busted Pelican showgirl who squawks into a rusty mic night after night in the wretched basement of a cruise ship floating through hell. Puddles Rising, is a music project rooted in the political legacy of drag, contemporary dance/performance and Berlin’s complex renaissance of art, club culture, and queer forms of care. At its base, it is a raucous duo with Jeremy Wade as Puddles the Pelican (vocals, synth, jazz hands) and Quentin Tolimieri as Sunny the Sea Anemone (keys, synth). Budget providing, they are a smokin’ hot quartet with Zienawa as Liliana the Lobster (percussion, vibes) and Wong as Eric the Electric Eel, (guitar). Together they invite you to an all you can eat world fusion buffet of feeling, a video in your mind, a politically charged form of queer science fiction at your service for the complicated now. Our cruise ship’s famous host is Puddles the Pelican, a bedraggled bird and survivor of the Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill. This bird gathers herself for yet another evening of story, song, scorn, sorrow, and jazz hands trembling. She sings, quacks, moans, and tells stories of love and loss, “once a glorious bird, now covered in oil. Which one of you Bitches has a match?”
This blood and guts odyssey is an experimental concert/performance bridging and defying category and genre: Cabaret, Hörspiel or Radio Play, Stand Up, Free Jazz, Noise, Doom, Blues, Indie Rock, and Apocalyptic Piano Bar Drag Musical on Acid.
This is a show built from the bottom up, for busted queers of all kinds: hallucinatory, dreamlike, absolutely inappropriate, deeply emotional, and funny as hell. From an apocalyptic imaginary to soaring moments of revival, this is social work, the venue a community center. She iconifies legendary crips, drags, riffraff, fuck ups, dykes, street queens, starlets, cruisers, torch singers, sluts, rare birds, and the common dot com criminal. Every joke, every cringeworthy moment of silence, every tear shed on stage, a connection-hub for mourning and celebrating via reciprocal exchange.
This is a show built from the bottom up, for busted queers of all kinds: hallucinatory, dreamlike, absolutely inappropriate, deeply emotional, and funny as hell. From an apocalyptic imaginary to soaring moments of revival, this is social work, the venue a community center. She iconifies legendary crips, drags, riffraff, fuck ups, dykes, street queens, starlets, cruisers, torch singers, sluts, rare birds, and the common dot com criminal. Every joke, every cringeworthy moment of silence, every tear shed on stage, a connection-hub for mourning and celebrating via reciprocal exchange.
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quote
Wade’s performance, which moves between a queer art of failure and artisanal perfection transfers the principles that characterize his physical performances to the voice: he quickly switches between energetic, physical registers and a fragile, falsetto-like head voice, between a broken, stuttering speech rhythm and elegiac singing. He is carried along by a superb band that plays through the classic genres of American bar shows: Jazz, blues, soul, bossa, broken up by electronics and indie rock. With a few exceptions of covers, they play songs written by Wade, Ezra Green and always arranged by Wade and Tolimieri. Great, permeable songs that often end somewhere other than where they began.
– Maximilian Haas, Texte Zur Kunst (2022)
press release
Berlin-based performer Jeremy Wade takes us on a queer sci-fi journey to the open sea in a cruise ship on level minus nine. This journey also takes us through the tragic life story of Miss Puddles the Pelican, who, rescued from an oil spill by the crew, has since taken to the stage every night as a cabaret singer, shaking, smoothing, plucking feathers and posing his whole body. "We do this night after night - it's the magic of continuity."
He is accompanied by the piano music of Quentin Tolimieri, which, dramaturgically sophisticated, takes us from a happy showbiz tune down to the dark, apocalyptic depths of "Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. But hey, "It's time to put on a show!" The "little bird" (as he was affectionately called by his sister who perished in the oil spill), stretches his wings aloft, lets the oil-smeared plumage glisten, brushes the fluff from his face, winks with one eye and winds his way singing, cawing, and dancing with skin and feathers through what must be the most difficult story: his own biography.
He is accompanied by the piano music of Quentin Tolimieri, which, dramaturgically sophisticated, takes us from a happy showbiz tune down to the dark, apocalyptic depths of "Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. But hey, "It's time to put on a show!" The "little bird" (as he was affectionately called by his sister who perished in the oil spill), stretches his wings aloft, lets the oil-smeared plumage glisten, brushes the fluff from his face, winks with one eye and winds his way singing, cawing, and dancing with skin and feathers through what must be the most difficult story: his own biography.
A story of becoming that is ruthlessly demanded by the audience and the society that is generally considered to be hungry for sensations. This very special night marks the fourth anniversary of the rescue of the "little bird" and we become witness*es of her struggle for survival and her grief inscribed in her bird body. "We all have to come to terms with our bodies," encourages us the "fluffy lady" who, once a glamorous bird in the brightest of plumage, moves, dances and sings with the wounds inflicted on her, in new, old, timeless, queer, complicated, strange, very unique ways.
At the same time, she reminds us, "... this horizon of possibilities is not an endless phallic version of the future, it is not infinite. This Earth is our home, it is a dome, it is a site of trauma, it is our womb, it is a wound."
The emancipating act of speculating simultaneously establishes the present and designs the future. Puddle reminds us of the real, material boundaries we all come up against in different ways, revealing our interdependencies, vulnerabilities, and finitude. "where is weeee?" How can we move together in recognition of our difference in a dialogical closeness that does not strive for unity and uniformity, but understands love as an invitation to the foreign?
Foreign to the pelican were also his rescuers and their language: "I awoke in the infirmary to the voices of witches who held their hands over me, nurses chanted things." They encourage the bird to pick himself up, to face life, and above all, to go on stage "You got shows to do little bird!" And so, every night, Puddles returns to his task of entertaining the audience - us. The microphone stand on which the bird clings, pulls up his tired body, nestles lasciviously against it, or drags it behind him like a burden, oscillates between technical assistant and pole dance pole. Entirely in the spirit of posthumanism, he shows us not only the interdependence of human and non-human actors, but also our embedding in much larger organic-biological and inorganic-technical structures.
Gradually, the deeper we are woven into the story of the little bird, the more we realize that we have long been on the minus nine level. Deep down in the belly of the cruise ship called capitalism with a steady course "into the great nothingness".
And we can be thankful that Puddles the pelican sings us his sister's song: "It's gonna be okay, little bird, even if it is not okay, little bird."
At the same time, she reminds us, "... this horizon of possibilities is not an endless phallic version of the future, it is not infinite. This Earth is our home, it is a dome, it is a site of trauma, it is our womb, it is a wound."
The emancipating act of speculating simultaneously establishes the present and designs the future. Puddle reminds us of the real, material boundaries we all come up against in different ways, revealing our interdependencies, vulnerabilities, and finitude. "where is weeee?" How can we move together in recognition of our difference in a dialogical closeness that does not strive for unity and uniformity, but understands love as an invitation to the foreign?
Foreign to the pelican were also his rescuers and their language: "I awoke in the infirmary to the voices of witches who held their hands over me, nurses chanted things." They encourage the bird to pick himself up, to face life, and above all, to go on stage "You got shows to do little bird!" And so, every night, Puddles returns to his task of entertaining the audience - us. The microphone stand on which the bird clings, pulls up his tired body, nestles lasciviously against it, or drags it behind him like a burden, oscillates between technical assistant and pole dance pole. Entirely in the spirit of posthumanism, he shows us not only the interdependence of human and non-human actors, but also our embedding in much larger organic-biological and inorganic-technical structures.
Gradually, the deeper we are woven into the story of the little bird, the more we realize that we have long been on the minus nine level. Deep down in the belly of the cruise ship called capitalism with a steady course "into the great nothingness".
And we can be thankful that Puddles the pelican sings us his sister's song: "It's gonna be okay, little bird, even if it is not okay, little bird."
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