The Whale Street

CPPP 2023 // The Whale Street, story of a human epic.

In The Whale Street, Captain Ahab embarks on a veritable urban odyssey in pursuit of the legendary cetacean. Drifting through the streets of the city, his obsessive quest and desire for revenge seems to lead him to his downfall. As the end of its journey approaches, the beast wakes up. The two camps stare at each other: the captain and his henchmen are going to brave the chthonic creature.

In this show, Cie CPPP adapts the bestseller Moby Dick to the scale of a city. The different adventures of the story are staged to the rhythm of live music, narrated thanks to the prowess of the circus artists, and the performances of the dancers. The encounter with the legendary creature, its pursuit, and their final battle make the streets of the city the pages of this spectacular novel.

The Whale Street is a street show in two acts, a parade, and a final with pyrotechnics.

The parade consists of a chase between the two protagonists, the whale, and Captain Achab, accompanied by their crew. His boat, decked with lights, fire and smoke, is a frail skiff in front of the mastodon that chases him. No uniformity among his sailors, who are only an unruly and disparate band. So they advance with temerity, but without order or consistency. And soon, hunters are hunted. Conversely, Moby Dick, heavy, austere, with his disciplined and homogeneous crew, advance straight ahead, sure of his actions. She is water, when Achab is fire.

Moby Dick is the story of a fight, a struggle between man and nature. Whale fat is an essential resource for economic development, in the early stages of the industrial revolution. However, its overexploitation forces man to track this resource further and further. And one day, the resource rebels. The hunted becomes a hunter. Nature, in danger, becomes killer.

While they continue their frantic race, whose outcome seems to lead both to their loss, they are challenged by death, which warns them: their incessant struggle leads them to a total and inevitable end. By annihilating the living, they endanger death itself.

At the end of the parade, the time changes suddenly. The protagonists replay some of the great struggles that have marked the history of man, clashes where good can be evil, where evil can sometimes do good.

And in the end, like Melville's novel, where Moby Dick and Captain Achab disappear into the depths of the oceans, do men, through constant fighting and struggle, not head for a similar outcome?

For if it is also these struggles whose results have shaped the world as we know it, will they ever be able to build the world to come?