Moby Dick performance. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage.
Moby Dick
Toronto, Ontario
Presented by
Harbourfront Centre
Seven actors, 50 puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra and a whale-sized whale equals a visually striking theatrical adaptation of Melville’s magnificent beast of a book from award-winning French-Norwegian puppetry company Plexus Polaire.
“My grandfather was a sailor. He had a naked woman tattooed on his upper arm, and I remember him as a smell of tar and tobacco. He came from an island on the west-coast of Norway, a tiny harbor filled with foreign ships and languages, fishermen, sailors and children waiting for fathers who never came home from the sea… I like how the sea somehow draws invisible lines between the different corners of the world, how it creates points of connection. How, facing this force of nature, we are all the same. And no one captures the battle between man and nature like Herman Melville in Moby Dick. An ancient white whale, a captain steering his ship into destruction and the inner storms of the human heart. Moby Dick is the tale of a whaling expedition, but also the story of an obsession or an investigation into the unexplained mysteries of life. To quote Melville: ‘It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.’ – Yngvild Aspeli (Director, Creator and Artistic Director, Plexus Polaire)
A Plexus Polaire production co-presented by Harbourfront Centre and Why Not Theatre as part of Harbourfront Centre’s Festival of Cool.
Event Supporters
Artistic director of Plexus Polaire, Yngvild Aspeli, develops a visual world that brings our most buried feelings to life. The use of life-sized puppets is at the center of her work, but the actor’s performance, the presence of the music and the use of light and video are all equal elements in communicating the story.
Director, actress, puppeteer and puppet-maker, Yngvild Aspeli studied at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris (2003-2005) and at ESNAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette) in Charleville-Mézières (2005-2008).
Within her French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire, she has directed six shows: Signals (2011), Opera Opaque (2013), Ashes (2014), Chambre noire (2017), Moby Dick (2020) and Dracula (2022). She is currently working on an adaptation of A Doll’s House that will premiere in Autumn 2023.
