Songs of Whales and Wanting

In the organizer's words:

SONGS OF WHALES AND WANTING takes Herman Melville's Moby Dick as a starting point to examine a material that still serves as a model text of Western modernity today: expedition, resource frenzy, surveying mania and metaphysical search for meaning collide. Melville's novel is at once a natural history, an adventure machine and a major philosophical question - and thus an archive of images about the relationship between man and the world, work and myth, violence and knowledge. The white whale appears less as an animal than as a projection surface: for the sublime, the unavailable, but also for a modernity that transforms nature into raw material, time into timing and body into function.

The performance locates this material in the historical upheavals of the 19th century - the rise of industrial capitalism, the emergence of new production and dependency relationships, the shift in world views. What is interesting here is not the "back then" as a backdrop, but the continuity: which narratives legitimize exploitation, which desires drive expansion, and how are categories such as nature/culture, human/animal, technology/fate created?

With reference to today's AI technologies, the motif of projection is taken further: archives, images and ideas are remixed, the past is reassembled, the future is designed from existing data - an actualization of the question of who narrates, who is seen and who disappears.

On stage, acting, dance, language, singing, live music and visual art intertwine. The three performers Alice Gartenschläger, Lucy Wirth and Daniel Nerlich pass through roles, states and visual axes, alternate between narration and embodiment and work with a movement vocabulary of concrete actions and rituals.

With

Performance: Alice Gartenschläger, Lucy Wirth & Daniel Nerlich
Director, sound design: Tom Schneider
Video, dramaturgy: Tobias Staab
Stage, costumes: Nadja Sofie Eller
Production management: Nadine Freisleben (apricot productions)

Play duration: 90 minutes

There is a content note for this play. This can be found in the accessibilitysection of our website.

Funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Freiburg and the Landesverband Freie Tanz- und Theaterschaffende Baden-Württemberg e.V.

Price information:

Admission solidarity price system 10€ / 15€ / 20€ / 25€