The Matter of Plexus Polaire’s Moby Dick

There is a well-trotted story that Herman Melville, as he was writing Moby Dick from his study in the Berkshires, saw in the snow-covered humps of Mount Greylock the eponymous white whale. This story of imaginative transformation may be apocryphal, but it captures something of the expansive, mercurial animacy that pervades Plexus Polaire’s stage adaptation of Moby Dick. In January, the Norwegian company brought the show, directed by Yngvild Aspeli, to the Paramount Theatre in Boston as part of ArtsEmerson’s 2023-2024 season. Over the course of the ninety-minute production, fifty-odd puppets cross the stage. Many of these figures are life-size, and surprisingly lifelike, causing more than one moment of doubt: is that a person? A puppet? A projection? Moby Dick leans into these slippery edges, embracing both the illusionistic spectacle of moving objects and the fluid negotiations of attention and control between the puppets and puppeteers. 

The story follows Ishmael, whose listlessness on land drives him to sea. He joins the whale ship Pequod, which is populated by an eclectic crew of sailors: the young cabin-boy Pip, the steadfast second mate Starbuck, and the seasoned harpooner Queequeg, with whom Ishmael forms a special bond. At the helm is Captain Ahab, who is monomaniacal in his quest for Moby Dick, the whale that took his leg many years before. Ishmael and the crew of the Pequod follow their captain in his growing obsession and find solace in one another as they come up against the harrowing realities of whaling. Ishmael narrates, with text pulled largely from Melville’s novel.

In Moby Dick, there is nothing on stage that does not, at some point, come alive. It is just a question of when it gets our attention.

The production itself is trickier to summarize. There is the raised platform at the rear of the stage, which serves as the ship’s cabin and deck (scenography by Elisabeth Holager Lund). Projections (video by David Lejard-Ruffet), music (composed by Guro Skumsnes Moe, Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen, and Havard Skaset), and sound effects performed by a small group of musicians do the remainder of the scene-setting. But the real wonder comes from the show’s population of puppeteers and puppets, created by Aspeli along with Polina Borisova, Manon Dublanc, Sebastien Puech, and Elise Nicod. All of the characters are puppets—and sometimes more than one. Captain Ahab, for example, appears as a life-sized puppet, with one puppeteer, and as a giant puppet, whom it takes a team to rein in. Ishmael, by contrast, emerges first as a human actor and later alternates with his puppet form. A single character, then, is not bounded by a single body.

In trying to describe the production, I come up against the need to define who is doing things on stage. It is easy to say that Ishmael goes to sea, hunts a whale, talks with Queequeg. But the Ishmael I refer to is made up of an actor, a puppet, and multiple puppeteers. So how do I acknowledge that? Linguists talk about “animacy” as a structuring principle of grammar and meaning. Languages reflect and are governed by concepts of animacy—a term that can encompass movement, life, sentience, feeling, and much more. Animacy, then, determines who or what we understand to have affect and to be affected. The linguist Mel Y. Chen argues in Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect for an expansive and scalar understanding of animacy: stones may be near zero on that scale, but they are not inanimate. Likewise, in Moby Dick, there is nothing on stage that does not, at some point, come alive. It is just a question of when it gets our attention.

When a production like Moby Dick puts a group of human puppeteers in masks and foregrounds instead the matter they manipulate—that is, puppets—it disrupts our expectations for where life resides.

When Ishmael and the other pallbearers (all actors) carry out Queequeg’s coffin, for instance, it begins to shake, as if someone is beating it from within. The lid pushes open and Queequeg sits up, having recalled, as Ishmael tells us, “a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying.” Queequeg puffs on his pipe, and we see the evidence of life not in movement—his only motion is to raise his pipe—but in the sense of energy through him, which the smoke he puffs makes visible. It is a simple trick: the puppeteers shake the coffin and pull out the puppet. The effect, however, is one of subtle differentiation. The pallbearers carry out two objects, the puppet and the coffin. Where the coffin moves only to remain a prop, however, Queequeg sits up and regains his liveliness. Indeed, Queequeg registers his life in contrast to the coffin, as if he himself is not equally wooden. As for the pallbearers, they gather around Queequeg and tend to him quietly as both audience and instrument to his resurrection.

In her exploration of animacy, Chen demonstrates that a scalar understanding of the term also reveals “animacy hierarchies.” Unsurprisingly, humans feature at the top of such hierarchies, poised as those most likely to have agency, to think, to feel, to dream. So when a production like Moby Dick puts a group of human puppeteers in masks and foregrounds instead the matter they manipulate—that is, puppets—it disrupts our expectations for where life resides.