Ocean Filibuster

When will the Ocean get fed up and not shut up until it’s heard?

The ocean gets a chance to tell its side of the story in this new music theater experience from Obie Award-winning theater company PearlDamour. Making its Southeast premiere as part of Live Arts Miami's 2022-2023 season, Ocean Filibuster explores the intimate, critical relationship between humans and the ocean. Using large-scale projection, a locally cast "ocean choir" and augmented-reality technology, Ocean Filibuster is an epic battle of wits and wills, smarts and sass, facts and anthropocentric fiction.

Linking below-the-surface mystery with above-the-surface climate issues, Ocean Filibuster puts audiences in the middle of a human-ocean showdown. Set in a future global senate, performer Jenn Kidwell embodies two rivals: Mr. Majority — who introduces a bill to end the ocean as we know it — and the ocean, arriving in human form to filibuster the bill. Originally commissioned by American Repertory Theater in collaboration with Harvard University's Center for the Environment, Ocean Filibuster draws from myth, standup and science to plunge us into the most heated debate of our time.

All performances include a special interactive intermission, where audiences can explore multiple "mini-labs" combining scientific fact and playful fabulation to evoke wonder and curiosity and bring them deeper into the themes of the show. Ocean Filibuster is part of Live Arts Miami’s EcoCultura series of “performances for the planet” and encourages audiences to look out from the theater to the ocean, climate and community of which we are all a part.