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.

In an early scene, Captain Ahab (a puppet, life-sized) addresses a crowd of sailors in Sandhamn fishing hats and ankle-length slickers. The actors shout and stomp against the pounding rain and their storming captain. But look closer and you find that some of the people hold other, wooden-headed sailors. These figures are draped in the same long slickers, but no feet protrude below their hems. It takes a moment to parse the difference, and even then it is difficult to tell one swaying form from another. The rapt crowd is made up of both puppets and puppeteers: Ahab is fixed in a hybrid gaze. In the theatre, where a human audience is defined by its attention, this scene troubles simple distinctions between subjects and objects. Both people and puppets, it shows, are equally able to behold.

At other times, the life of the puppet is defined in relation to the life of the puppeteer. When the puppet Queequeg and the actor Ishmael lock hands in a friendly arm-wrestle it seems as if either one could be the source of energy. Their impasse, still though it is, animates them both. In another scene, the life-sized Ahab and his puppeteer sway on the foredeck, each supporting the other in their embrace. The scene reads as tender and tense—the skeletal puppeteer both soothes and haunts, and Ahab yields to this figure, who is really part of himself. On a purely mechanical level, of course, the act of surrender and the act of support are both performed by the puppeteer, who releases the puppet from their hand, only to hold Ahab up with their shoulder. Queequeg does not have strength to resist Ishmael any more than Ahab has exhaustion to express in resting his head on his puppeteer. But in these moments we see the puppets controlled by their puppeteers and somehow independent—simultaneously doubled, othered, and othering.

Two whales: one raw material, the other supremely animate with loss.

Elsewhere, the puppeteers disappear—either in a flurry of activity or in the shadows of the stage—and the puppets themselves appear autonomous. When the crew processes a whale, Queequeg jumps atop the floating carcass to protect it from encroaching sharks. He jabs with his harpoon at the snapping jaws, balancing perilously on a chunk of valuable whale meat. If he is fighting so hard to survive, it seems, he must have a life to lose. And it is not only the human-shaped puppets who cling to survival. In one particularly nail-biting sequence, model whaleboats—each about a foot long and outfitted with movable oars—scull across the shallow downstage light. The boats are manipulated on rods, allowing the puppeteers to slip entirely into darkness. At first, the rods are held aloft, so that we see the boats from the side. But as they chase down a zig-zagging whale, the perspective suddenly shifts: the tops of the boats turn toward the audience to show an aerial view of the pursuit. Harpoons fly and sink into the whale’s back, tethering the giant creature to the tiny boats. Finally, the whale tires and the perspective shifts back to show the boats from the side: the stage is once more depth, rather than expanse. And in that depth, the whale is not prey but parent. Underwater, a calf circles the dying whale as it drags below the bobbing boat. The puppeteers are shrouded in darkness for this sequence, abandoning the calf on stage as its mother slowly unravels, her outer layer curling away like the peel of a lemon before her skeletal cage drifts into the deep. Two whales: one raw material, the other supremely animate with loss.

At best, attending to objects can prompt us to reconsider the material world and our place in it. As Chen puts it, such an approach “perpetually resituates, recombines, and rearticulates the matter of life.” Chen’s key claim is that animacy has biopolitical stakes. She is interested in “animacy as a specific kind of affective and material construct” that is shaped as much by race, sexuality, and ability, as it is by divisions between species, types of matter, and conceptual forms. Such differences are very much part of Moby Dick, most prominently in the interspecies drama of the whale hunt. What Plexus Polaire’s production does, however, is decouple animacy from hierarchy.

Even ideas—immaterial and typically low-ranking in terms of animacy—take on life here. The largest Ahab puppet charts his pursuit of Moby Dick in a manic fit. His puppeteers, wearing black cloaks and deathly masks, cluster around him, each moving one of his oversized limbs. As Ahab’s thoughts roil, the objects on his desk—a map, a compass, a model whale—begin to swirl around him. In his fevered obsession, these things take on lives of their own, and Ahab rails against them. Eventually, even his peg leg drifts away, and the phantom whale that has been swimming around the stage approaches to take its place. The tail becomes a foot, the head a knee, and the whale’s body morphs into his lower leg. Ahab’s fixation, independent and active, attaches itself to him.

Animacy, then, runs continuously through the production, including through its mechanics. There are the strings of a marionette, as when Ahab’s madness is staged as an elaborate hanging-up: a team of masked puppeteers hook the arms, legs, and head of an eight-foot Ahab to weighted wires that drop from above. They pull these wires like change-ringers, using their whole bodies to raise his arms and shake his legs. Ahab lumbers above the stage, at the edges of the puppeteers’ control and his own.

There are also the ropes that are part of the world of a ship, such as the hammocks hung in the cabin below deck. The puppets gently sway, easily mistaken for flesh and blood as they sleep in the soft glow of the scene. Or there is the rigging of the ship, from which Ishmael and Queequeg keep their watch. The two puppets slide along the beam, holding onto the lifts to balance themselves. Then there is the rigging of the stage. Our final glimpse of Moby Dick is as a floating behemoth, his projection blinking slowly across a great white sheet lowered by the hidden ropes of the theatre.

So the puppeteers themselves are not unlike the crew of the Pequod. They steer the puppets as a sailor does a ship or a stagehand the rigging of a theatre. These material affinities echo the porous natures of animacy itself. When one cord is pulled, it could move an arm, a hammock, a ship, or the staged world itself.