WHALETRACKING unlimited, M.D.
A music theater performance, spatial concept, Le Grand Theatre de Luxembourg, Lux /Hellenic Theater Festival, Athen, Gr
M.D.—Moby Dick: An effort to pack the entire meaning of the enlightenment into one book, from its scientific tracts and pointed religious ambivalence, to the individualism, psychology and social observations that make the novel so modern. A novel that has lent itself to the imagination of nearly every literary culture in the world and has produced one of the most iconic characters in literature as well as certainly the most iconic animal. M.D. has inspired everyone from the revolutionary (the RAF), to the obvious (the teachers who founded Starbucks Coffee), to the deconstructionist. It is the vast web of associations stimulated by the novel—much more than the simple plotline or the literary qualities—which call out for the stage.
Notation systems
M.D. has a story in it, but THE TRACKWORKERS are most interested in the material the story is embedded in: the world of highly peculiar objects—hyper-objects—and peculiar but unchanging persons—allegorical people; the temporal disjunctions; democratic sentiments woven into a dictatorial melodrama.
THE TRACKWORKERS call into question the hierarchical relationships in opera, theatre and text, sound, action, and setting. Catching up on the tendencies of the 70’s to open up the hermetic understanding of artwork, we combine it with multimedia and the theatrical expression of the 21st century.
Just coming back from a two month kayak trip along the north-west coast of Greenland, spending an uncountable number of days waiting for narwhals with the local hunters, I was very fascinated with the cloudy feeling of time while waiting for game and wanted to somehow transport that notion into the piece as it was progressing.
Here below are suggestions for a notation system on the stage floor as the performers and the objects on stage are changing location.
Furthermore I wanted to create a whale. Or rather the fragmented legend of the whale as it was lost in translation on its travel from the high north and into the antiquity. The Unicorn, the beast with a large, pointed, spiralling horn projecting from its forehead. Or rather another deformation of the myth of the unicorn. Hunts for an actual animal as the basis of the unicorn myth, accepting the conception of writers in Antiquity that it really existed somewhere at the edge of the known earth, have added a further layer of mythologising about the unicorn. These have taken various forms, interpreted in a scientific, rather than a wonder-filled manner, to accord with modern perceptions of reality.
Similar is the synergy between reality and fiction of Moby Dick. The symbolism of the White Whale is deliberately enigmatic. Ishmael describes the whale’s forehead as having wrinkles and scars look like hieroglyphics, and recounts:
If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
BY: Gassim Abdelkader (Visual Arts), Lothar Baumgarte (Light), Maggie Bell (Dramaturgy), Leo Dick (Instrumental Composition), Jana Findeklee (Video), Timo Kreuser (Electronic Composition, Musical and Artistic Direction), Annesofie Norn (Visual Arts and Stage), Joki Tewes (Costumes), Jonas Zipf (Performance Studies)
WITH: Camilla Baratt-Due, Thea Danielsen Fjørtoft, Konstantin Hapke, Elisabeth de Merode, John Eckhardt, Robin Hayward, Timo Kreuser, Daniël Ploeger, Katharina Streit, Wilm Thoben, Pascal Viglino
AND: Konstantin Hapke (Video Operation), Sophie Nikolitsch (Stage management), Daniel Plewe (Sound Direction), Wilm Thoben (Sound Direction and Programming)
Produced by AHAB SHIPPING CO.productions, Co-produced by Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg and Athens Festival. Made possible by Deutsche Bank Foundation. Supported by Norsk Kulturråd, Nordic Culture Point and Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council.