Following a successful run in 2024, Gabi Flares returns to the Edinburgh Fringe with Deluge, a surreal, tender, and darkly humorous exploration of the grieving process. Gabi Flares is a London-based Brazilian actress, dancer, clown, and writer, investigating the poetical and humorous interplay between movement and text through the body.
In Deluge, Flares brings together her interdisciplinary approach to create a richly textured performance that is both visually inventive and emotionally resonant.
Where: Big Belly at Underbelly Cowgate
When: 5-30 Aug
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/deluge
What can you tell us about your show? What is it about and where did the idea come from?
The idea for the show Deluge started with a sentence I said to a friend after a break-up: “if I could count all my thoughts in litres and add everything I have cried, I could flood a house.” I immediately knew it was my next show. It is a comedy, perhaps more precisely a dramedy. A very physical show, blending clowning, dance, live piano, and video projection.
But it’s not really about the break-up, or not only. It’s about the grief we carry for things without clear endings: projects that never happened, frustration, faded friendships, versions of ourselves we never became. I became absorbed in the question: what are people actually grieving for? So I put out a social media callout and asked strangers to share their stories. Over 40 people responded.
This is the second show I’ve made this way, interviewing people is something I always come back to. I suspect my mum being a psychoanalyst has something to do with it. Those voices are woven throughout: real stories blended with fiction, as one woman embarks on a magical realist journey through the grieving process.
Magical realism doesn’t abandon reality: it stretches it. It takes what is felt but unseen, and makes it physical, present, impossible to ignore. Grief is largely invisible, but what if you could see it? What if it filled a room, spilled over, took the shape of water, jam, a Komodo dragon? That’s where the show lives. A show about a woman in a house that is about to flood.
How would you sell it to audiences in one paragraph?
Deluge is a comedy theatre show inspired by over 40 real-life stories about grief and healing, gathered through a social media callout. Blending reality with fiction, it follows one woman as her inner world tips sideways after a break-up, but this is not a show about a break-up. Mixing magical realism with physical comedy, expect Komodo dragons, a thousand kilos of jam, and litres of water. It’s silly. It’s surprising. It has a heart.
Do you enjoy participating in the Fringe? And do you have any moments you particularly remember?
I love the Fringe, and sometimes, when I’m completely exhausted, I am convinced I hate it, which probably just proves how much I love it. This will be my fifth Fringe with a show. Well, many moments… Flyering always holds surprises. Once, I flyered someone I fell in love with and that guy became the starting point for this show. Though I should say: the show is largely fiction. The person was real. The rest is theatre.
What are you looking forward to the most in Edinburgh?
Watching shows and being reminded why I do this. And the conversations, with other artists, with strangers, with people who have just seen something that moved them.
What’s next for the show?
The show is currently touring Europe. We have already been to Brighton and Prague, and coming up are Isle of Wight, Durham, Edinburgh, Gothenburg Fringe, Oslo Fringe, and Istanbul Fringe. And then? We will see.