Rubalee

Rubalee is a heavy metal musical by Caborca that dives into the North Atlantic right whale’s struggle for survival. With nine cast members and a live drummer on stage, its choral vocals soar over black-metal percussion and synth, creating a soundscape as wild and urgent as the show’s themes.

The story follows Rubalee and her mother, Romula, as they undertake a dangerous migration to Eubalena, the fabled refuge of the southern right whales from which their species separated eons ago. Along the way, they confront the hellish realities of their world: deadly ship strikes, entanglements in fishing gear, and unrelenting industrial noise that left their pod divided over whether to fight or flee. Above the surface, humans range from feckless to sinister as they observe and interfere with the journey of the refugees.

With fewer than 400 individuals left swimming along the Atlantic coast of North America, Rubalee is a musical rallying call for a species on the brink and a poetic confrontation with civilizational collapse.

In development since 2020, this ASAP residency presentation will be a lightly staged reading of the script, for the first time with the full score.

Pregones/PRTT’s ASAP provides artists access to our NYC venues. Participation is through application and approval, with selection based on artistic merit and potential, in keeping with our mission to support underrepresented artists, foster growth, and incubate new works.

ABOUT CABORCA

CABORCA is a bilingual theatre ensemble under the auteurship of Javier Antonio González.

For over a decade, we have occupied a unique space in New York at the intersection of the Latinx and experimental arts communities, building an expansive body of politically and aesthetically charged work that confronts entrenched colonial power dynamics.

A laboratory for dramatic and performative forms, we create original and adapted works by engaging an ever-expanding range of tools such as multimedia, physical and dance theatre, nonlinearity, fluidity of character and language, and choral storytelling.

We take our name from Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, where Caborca is not only a town in the desert but an ephemeral poetry magazine turned cryptic manifesto.