The Sea Theatre

For millennia a working space with huge populations of sailors, wharf laborers, and ship-builders, the harbors of the world and much of the coasts have been transformed from a working space to a commodity spectacle. Today the sea is a multi-million dollar view, the ships invisible, the shopping malls and boutiques ever larger.

The cultural anthropologist Mick Taussig and the artist Hélène Baril present their play The Sea Theater for the first time at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Central theme of the performance is the questioning of the transformation of the sea from a working space to a spectacle of consumption.

The Sea Theater explores Nietzsche’s fascination with the sun setting in the sea on its journey underground. The focus of the play lies on the changes in the bodily unconscious along with sleep and the re-enchantment of the world because of the end of the world due to global warming, when marine creatures and humans transform into one another. Within this context the play abandons its format and presses into ritual.

Performed at Akademie Schloss Solitude for the first time in March 2014. Filmed by Lisa Rave.

First published in the publication Chronicles of Work.