Counter Culture

Bruna Longo

What hits you first about Whale Fall is its emotional clarity. Bruna Longo — the show’s writer, creator, and solo performer — speaks about the piece with a directness that makes its themes feel close to the skin. She’s not dealing in abstractions; she’s tracing grief, memory, and the strange beauty in collapse and renewal with a kind of steady, unforced honesty.

In this conversation, Bruna lays out the ideas driving the work and the experiences that shaped it. There’s no grandstanding, no over‑polish — just a clear sense of why Whale Fall exists and what she hopes it stirs in the audience. It’s a piece built on substance, and her reflections carry that same weight.

You can explore the production further on the Fringe listing.

1.              You’ve spoken about creating this piece in the aftermath of your father’s death. When grief becomes the raw material of a performance, does the stage feel like a refuge, a reckoning, or something stranger altogether?

I wasn’t setting out to make a play about my father’s death, or even one inspired by it. I started researching death because I was trying to understand what was happening to me, to face it, to face my grief. I am very, very nerdy. And at some point, it became very clear that my way of moving through life, of dealing with everything, is through theatre. As I say in the play, theatre is my religare, my non-religious form of spirituality. But I always want to make one thing clear: the show isn’t a therapeutic exercise about my mourning process. It’s the result of a genuine curiosity about death and grief that grew out of the research I began to help me navigate that experience. The play isn’t the process itself, it’s what came from it. So more than a refuge or a reckoning, the stage is a place of congregation, a place where we come together to share our humanity. And I think that’s what this process ultimately became for me.

2.              Western societies have a habit of sanitising death — hiding it behind curtains, euphemisms, and professionalised rituals. What convinced you that theatre could reopen that conversation without slipping into sentimentality or spectacle?

I think if we go back to how theatre was born, we already have the answer to that question. It’s a place where humanity gathers to see itself reflected. And theatre is so raw. Even when we try to make it more like film, with special effects or technology, it’s still fundamentally human. That’s what makes it so powerful and, for me, what makes it the perfect place to face our demons and our fears, to talk about them, and to bring them into the light.

3.              The original version of Whale Fall unfolded inside a functioning funeral chapel in São Paulo. How does relocating the work to St Cuthbert’s Church — with its own centuries of burial and memory — change the emotional temperature of the piece?

We perform in a historic chapel in São Paulo that dates back to 1912. So just the fact that the first recorded church on the site where St Cuthbert’s stands today dates from the 12th century is already incredible to me. Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese in 1500, although, of course, Indigenous peoples had been living there for thousands of years before that. But the Indigenous peoples of Brazil had very different cultures from civilizations like the Maya or the Aztec. They didn’t leave behind monumental stone architecture in the same way, so the oldest stone buildings we have are mostly from the Portuguese colonial period. I love history and architecture, and even though I’m certainly not a fan of colonization, whenever I visit historic buildings, I have a deep respect for the lives of the people who occupied those spaces before me. So performing in a place as ancient as St Cuthbert’s certainly adds another layer to the experience. You’re aware that so many people have passed through that space over so many centuries, carrying their own stories, their own joys, and their own grief. I think there’s something very beautiful about adding our story to that long continuum.

4.              You imagine your own death as a way of mourning yourself — an impossible act in life, but a potent one in theatre. What did that imaginative leap reveal to you that ordinary grief could not?

Imagining our own death, and really imagining the decomposition process, is actually a very Buddhist practice. I’m Buddhist, so it was something I always knew was done, but I never thought I’d actually be able to engage with it. I was afraid, as I think most of us are, to bring that image into my mind. This play is very much in the tradition of memento mori, an artistic tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, where artists depicted death and mortality to remind us that we’re alive. The full idea is memento mori, memento vivere: remember you will die, remember to live. That’s what imagining my own death has helped me do. Imagining my own death reminds me every day that I am very much alive, and it makes me want to be fully alive until the very last microsecond I live.

5.              The show blends autobiography, anthropology, philosophy, and physical theatre. When you’re working across so many registers, how do you keep the ritualistic core of the piece intact?

I always like to go back to the original meaning of things. So, what is a ritual? It’s a set of gestures, words, and formalized actions with symbolic meaning, performed by or in front of a group of people. And when you think about it, theatre is exactly that. Theatre is a ritual. Whale Fall  have different layers to it. The dramaturgy is built from ethnographic and anthropological research, together with some autobiographical elements. Then there’s the language of the performance itself. The physicality draws on traditions of physical theatre and also inspirations from Japanese theatre, although they’re not the kind of references an audience would necessarily recognize while watching the show. And then there’s the staging. The decision to perform inside a chapel wasn’t just an aesthetic choice; it was part of creating a ritual space. The scenes are structured in a very ritualized way. Music plays a fundamental role, as it does in so many ritual traditions. Those are the bricks the piece is made of. So the performance isn’t recreating any specific ritual, but it borrows the grammar of ritual to create a shared experience where we can gather and reflect on mortality together.

6.              You’ve said that death is perhaps the last taboo in Western culture. Do you think audiences are genuinely ready to confront it, or are they still arriving with the same fear and avoidance you’re trying to unpick?

One of my masters, the director Eugenio Barba, once said in a rehearsal that there is no audience. There is only that one person, and then the next person, and the next, and the next. I’ve carried that with me ever since. So I try to meet each audience member wherever they are. I’ve spoken to people after the show who told me it genuinely shifted something for them, that it helped them look at death with a little more tranquility than they had before. And then, about a month ago, I got a DM on Instagram from someone who had seen the show months earlier. They wrote, “I loved the show, but being inside the chapel in the cemetery was a horrible experience for me because I’m terrified of death.” They spent the whole performance feeling anxious, and yet they were still grateful they came. And I think that’s wonderful. If that’s what the show brought up for that person, then that’s what it brought up. I’m not trying to lead people toward one specific conclusion or emotional response. The only thing I hope is that people begin to think about death as part of life, as something worth bringing to the dinner table, into our everyday conversations. Where that reflection takes them is completely beyond my control. There isn’t a right or wrong way to experience the piece.

7.              The São Paulo Showcase is bringing a wave of Brazilian work to Edinburgh this year. What feels distinctly Brazilian about Whale Fall, and what feels universal — something that belongs to anyone who has ever lost someone?

Death is a universal experience. Everybody dies in the end: spoiler alert! But culturally, we relate to death in many different ways. There are a lot of similarities across Western societies, especially in big cities and metropolitan areas, but every culture has its own temperament, its own rituals, and its own emotional relationship with death. Part of the research behind the show was also ethnographic. I became fascinated by the different ways cultures around the world care for their dead and make sense of loss. The performance brings some of those funeral rites into conversation with our own Western, capitalist, highly industrialized experience of death to remind us that the way we approach death isn’t universal, it’s cultural. And once we realize that, we can start asking whether the relationship we’ve built with death is really the one we want. So, of course, the show brings my own perspective: a Brazilian-Italian Latina woman from one of the biggest cities in the world. But underneath all those identities, I’m just another person who’s going to die and going to lose people I love. And that’s the one thing every audience member and I have in common.

8.              You’re performing 18 shows without a break at the Fringe. How do you protect your own emotional and physical boundaries when the work itself asks you to revisit grief night after night?

That’s a fantastic question. People have asked me before how I deal with talking about my grief and my father every week, month after month. But the truth is, it’s not really about my grief, and it’s not really about my father anymore. And that’s very important to me. As I said before, the research began because of my father’s death and my attempt to understand my own experience of mourning. But once I decided to turn that research into a performance, it stopped being about processing my grief and started being about sharing the curiosity that had grown out of it: my curiosity about death, grief, and ritual. During the research and rehearsal process, there were definitely moments when it was difficult to face some emotions. But once the show opened, something shifted. It became about celebrating life. So, for me, it’s actually a very joyful show. I know that sounds contradictory because it’s about death, but I don’t experience it as a sad piece. I don’t feel like I have to protect myself emotionally from performing it. Physically, though, that’s a different story. Eighteen performances in a row is a lot, and I’m no spring chicken anymore. So I’m trying to get as strong as I can before Edinburgh. It’s a demanding show for my voice because I sing throughout it, and it’s demanding on my body, especially my spine. During the run, my plan is to sleep well, eat well, take care of myself… and wait until it’s all over before I start celebrating.

9.              The press in Brazil described the piece as courageous, ritualistic, and among the year’s best. Does that kind of acclaim create pressure, or does it give you permission to push even further into the uncomfortable questions the show raises?

Honestly, I believe in acclaim as much as I believe in bad reviews. I try not to give either of them too much weight because I don’t think it’s particularly helpful or healthy. Of course, reviews and award nominations are fantastic for the business of show business. They help put bums on seats, they give the work credibility, and they make the show more visible, especially at the Fringe, where audiences have thousands of shows to choose from. That’s all incredibly valuable. But for me, as an artist, what really matters is what happens in the room, in that living moment. That’s theatre. Everything else is important, but it isn’t theatre itself.

10.           If an audience member walks out of St Cuthbert’s with one lingering thought — not a neat lesson, but a disturbance they can’t quite shake — what do you hope that thought is?

I want people to leave asking themselves: What kind of relationship do I want to have with death? There’s a Brazilian psychoanalyst, Rubem Alves, who wrote that instead of being something frightening or cruel, death can be a counselor. I love that. We already know we’re going to die: that part isn’t optional. So maybe, instead of trying to forget about death or push it away, we can let that awareness guide the way we choose to live. And that has very practical consequences too. When we allow ourselves to talk about death, we’re much more likely to take ownership of how we want to die. We can leave our wishes behind, have conversations with our loved ones and our doctors, think about palliative care or assisted dying if that is aligned with our values. These are conversations we tend to avoid because they’re uncomfortable, but they’re really conversations about autonomy.

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