Moby Dick

Theatre

within BITEI - International Festival of Performing Arts
.
Twenty sailors, twenty men, twenty souls beat large wooden barrels, rumbling greedily, waiting for the whale blubber. The air rips and vibrates. The rhythm marks the work of the crew in a feverish shipyard. Board after board, lines, ropes and poles, the sailors begin to build the ship. Skeletal, unreal. It is our Pequod. Throughout the show there are battles, sudden storms, joyful raids; characters emerge, stories come to surface. The shadow of Ahab and his obscure desire for revenge, the sailors' nightmare, weighs down on everyone. With a meticulous work of theatrical machinery, the unexpected will happen. The ship becomes a whale. From guardian to monster. What once was welcoming now appears terrifying: the skeleton of the hull overturns and takes the form of the fearsome Leviathan. At last, the two enemies come face to face for the final confrontation: Achab and the white whale. Man against nature, the prodigy, the unknown, the lost God, the fear that screams from the abyss: Moby Dick.
video

concept and direction  Stefano Tè
literary adaptation for the stage play  Giulio Sonno
direction consultancy  Mario Barzaghi
live music  Alex Ascione (sax), Domenico Pizzulo (guitar and synth), Matteo Pontegavelli (trumpet), Igino L. Caselgrandi (drum and percussion)
costumes by  Teatro dei Venti
lighting design  Alessandro Pasqualini
sound  Luigi Pascale
stage design  Dino Serra
project and construction  Dino Serra and Massimo Zanelli
with:  Alessio Boni, Paola Caruso, Oxana Casolari, Ettore Chiummo, Marco Cupellari, Giacomo Dominici, Federico Faggioni, Francesca Figini, Davide Filippi, Mara Lambriola, Giovanni Maia, Iona Petmezakis, Irene Raccanelli, Lorenzo Rossi, Amalia Ruocco, Antonio Santangelo, Cesare Trebeschi, Davide Tubertini, Elisa Vignolo
a production by  Teatro dei Venti  in co-production with  Klaipeda Sea Festival (Lithuania)
with the support of  Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Modena, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena
with the contribution of  Municipality of Dolo (VE) in partnership with Associazione Echidna


from 27/05/2023 to 27/05/2023 hour 21.00
Dramaturgical notes
Moby Dick is an illusion. Everyone thinks they know what it is and yet no-one does. There is talk. Is it a whale? A sperm whale? A white monster? Very few people have in fact read the novel to the very end: almost everyone has given up after a while. Indeed, the nature of the book is quite different from what is portrayed in films, illustrations and anthologies. Page after page, the events go off the rails, Captain Ahab's fury overflows with feelings of revenge, his impossible hunt takes on a metaphysical meaning, and the reader - confused - gets lost: something is not quite right. What is it? The destination of this undertaking.
Why does a group of men decide to set off on a journey? While Melville was drawing inspiration from his own direct experience on a whale ship, from seafaring tales and Western literature, he was also nurturing that nascent American spirit that dreamt of democracy. Can a new model of society be built or are the masses condemned to being oppressed? Moby Dick thus becomes the "genius in a crowd", the impossible synthesis, Hobbes' ruthless Leviathan devouring Emerson's transcendentalism.
Yet however much a civilisation is destined to disappear amid the cogs of history, a propensity to travel always survives, a thin group of men will always decide to venture into uncertain waters to discover if another way of life is possible. Thus, the hunt for Moby Dick becomes the pursuit of an illusion.
The literary adaptation of the novel attempts to retrieve some of the voices that animated Melville's novel to provide the feeling of initiation to the journey made by the people on board the Pequod. A stage-float that is an ark, port and unforgotten wreck that goes beyond time. The famous incipit below is an invitation to the theatre: call me Ishmael, as if to say, let's pretend I am Ishmael and I will tell you all a story, let's pretend a dream of humanity is brought back to life, let's pretend this illusion becomes reality tomorrow.
BITEI – International Festival of Performing Arts 2023
with the support of Emilia-Romagna Region and  ATER Fondazione
Teatro dei Venti e.p.s.
Address: Via San Giovanni Bosco, 150
41121 MODENA (MO)
Telephone: +39 059 7114312
Email: organizzazione@teatrodeiventi.it
Web Site:http://www.teatrodeiventi.it