Ishmael and the Whale

I was reading Moby Dick for the first time in 2013. As a joke, I started “live tweeting” my reading of the book, pretending as if it was one of the mass audience events that people usually treat in this way. My Moby Dick tweets started out snarky. “Ok, fine, I’ll call you Ishmael,” I said. But, as I got further into the book, and I started to realize that I was actually processing this book, understanding the details of the writing and getting to know the characters much better than I’m usually able to, especially for such a long work.

In Chapter Nine, where Ishmael sits in a chapel on Nantucket and hears Melville’s retelling of the Jonah and the Whale story, I found the bringing together of these two stories really caused a profound collision of values. Jonah’s great humility makes Ahab’s hubris look all the more like naked aggression. Its an amazing foreshadowing of what’s to come in the novel.

When I wrote my text, I wanted to bring out the background of both stories, and talk about why they seem to oppose each other so completely using a blend of journalistic techniques and theatrical character development. The narrator walks a fine line between commenting on the story as an investigator, and as a character from the story. The music works almost like another character, sometimes supporting the narrator, sometimes contradicting him, always amplifying the speaker’s wonder at the depth of intersecting meanings in this collision of stories.

I want to offer sincere thanks to Spark and Echo for this opportunity, for their help in producing the premier performance, and for welcoming a non-Christian artist like me to participate in their project; to Ren Jackson for his great work with the text; to the musicians of AnyWhen Ensemble for their continued assistance in executing my diabolic plots; to Keith Biesack of ITGLOWSNYC for donating that amazing wine at the performance; and to Kirk Van der Swaagh of the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village for offering the use of their wonderful space in Greenwich Village.