When the White Whale Becomes a Theatrical Dream: The Destabilization of Anthropocentric Perception in Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick

Abstract

Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick, premiered at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 2024 and presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2026, radically condenses Herman Melville’s novel into a visual, acoustic, and choreographic event. This article examines how the production relocates theatrical agency from plot and psychological character to relations among light, sound, bodies, images, and duration. It combines close performance analysis with a comparative reading of Melville and the Daoist parable of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream. From this encounter, the article introduces the original concept of mutual dreaming: a theatrical condition in which human and nonhuman positions are reciprocally constituted through perception, projection, and embodied imagination. The concept does not attribute a realist psychology to the White Whale. Instead, it describes how Wilson’s scenography allows the whale to acquire agency across media: as sound, image, scale, light, spatial pressure, and an object of compulsive human projection. Captain Ahab’s wounded body becomes a visible sign of this unstable relation, while dispersed narration and codified ensemble movement weaken the sovereignty of the individual dramatic subject. The production’s acoustic dramaturgy and cinematic organization of stage space further transform spectatorship into an encounter with uncertain boundaries between hunter and hunted, observer and observed, dreamer and dreamed. By bringing Wilson scholarship on visuality, postdramatic form, and scenography into dialogue with Zhuangzi and posthuman thought, the article argues for Chinese philosophy as an analytical method rather than a cultural analogy. Wilson’s Moby Dick ultimately emerges as a late theatrical work that destabilizes anthropocentric perception without resolving the ethical and imaginative tensions between humanity and the nonhuman world.