This performance of Katie Duck and Sharon Smith is a joined venture of two women who are survivors, mothers, who love and carry on, who go deep in feelings and yet running the distance. In fact this is a performance of three women, two of which are mothers, three of which dressed in bikini for the show, as a tribute to a fourth woman.

Coming to think of which, the show is a performance containing plenty of women, who wrote songs without ever getting credited for, who were or are moms regardless of being thanked, who weren’t or couldn’t be moms,    who were the invisible hand, who were not ashamed of their feelings, their bodies, their roles…

• Concept, creation and performance: Katie Duck, Sharon Smith
• co-creation and lights: Emese Csornai

As Sharon Smith writes:

The inexpressible is contained inexpressibly in the expressed.

The title was a combination of ‘abandon ship’ and some sort of ‘you can’t run away from yourself’ reality check. Somehow, ‘being human’ is what we are stuck with.

The curse of the human must be all these feelings.

Having a child is a most vivid, unbearable emotion…  Irretrievable loss. You cannot put them back in, once they have torn themselves from your belly via vagina or scalpel, they set in motion a certain grief… a slow, life-long, death-looming loss. They leave you and leave you and leave you. And that is your job. To help them do just that.

The love is so strong that you can deal with their shit, their piss, their selfishness and their hatred… of you.

Katie and Sharon have daughters. It’s a woman thing. They have shared a friendship that has grown into family feelings over twenty years. This work seemed to explode all that, all those… feelings… all over the stage.

A soundtrack contains the action. It is haunted by female song writers who we love shamelessly and who we want to be in the room with us. There are others, but of course there is not enough space or time in one room (however grand) to include all the awesome women who wrote songs that speak through us and to us, in the work… in the life.