The Sea Theater - written and directed by Mick Taussig, drawings by Helene Baril

About this event

The cultural anthropologist Mick Taussig and the artist Hélène Baril present their play The Sea Theater. 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.

The argument: The aim is to explore through performance the changing meaning of one of the great signs of nature, namely the sea. 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.

Keywords: Re-enchantment. Human-animal. Awakening. End of the World. Revolution. Animation. De-Territorialization. Poetics of the Commodity. Painleve's octopus

Mick Taussig was a ship's doctor and for twenty years teaches anthropology and writing in New York/USA. Born in Australia, he has lived a long time in Colombia/South America. His writings include The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987), Defacement (1999), My Cocaine Museum (2004), Walter Benjamin's Grave(2006) and What Color is the Sacred? (2009). His The Sun Theater was performed in Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin/Germany and in the Whitney Museum in New York in early 2013.

Hélène Baril was born in 1978 in Saint-Julien-en-Genevois/France. She currently lives and works as a painter in Helsinki/Finland. Her idea of painting is to fuse and confuse the menial house painter meaning of painting with the fine arts meaning of painting.
In 2011, Hélène Baril received the Arteles Artist of the Year Award. In 2012, she founded the platform SBK, an autonomous and poetic organization.

14.03.2014, 19:30
Free

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