“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you’re writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman’s tongue.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin,

Adapted from the short story by beloved science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, Sur follows a 1909 expedition to the South Pole by a group of women driven by a passion to see Antarctica with their own eyes. The women travel in secret – theirs is a radical plan, considering the constraints placed by society and family. They travel by ship, set up camp on the ice, pull sledges, scale glaciers, and set out to reach the South Pole. What happens next, they promise never to tell. The story is presented as a report, a factual recounting of a journey. Could it have really happened? And if not, then why?

Now, in 2025, our collective of women brings Le Guin’s fantastical but harsh Antartica to life, transforming the Ellen Stewart Theater into a living breathing world of icebergs, glaciers, blizzards, and horizonless expanses.

CREDITS

Devised by the company:
Rasheedat Badejo
Mattie Barber-Bockelman
Gabriel Berry
Marina Celander
Katherine Paola De La Cruz
Maud Dinand
Sara Galassini
Megan Paradis Hanley
Allison Hiroto
Kim Ima
Berit Johnson
Onni Johnson
Leah Ogawa
Amanda Reynoso
Erato Tzavara
Tuce Yasak
Qingan Zhang