Germany's Düsseldorf Theatre presents Moby Dick at Shanghai Arts Festival

Bob Wilson would have been proud and happy to be here to present Moby Dick to the Shanghai audience, especially after Der Sandmann and Dorian were seen here, said Christoph Belka, former agent and manager of the legendary American theater artist.

Belka, together with Ann-Christin Rommen, a longtime co-director of Wilson's, and architect and stage designer Serge von Arx, met with the audience at Shanghai West Bund Theatre on Oct 23 before the Asian premiere of Moby Dick.

Robert Wilson (1941–2025) was a US playwright, director and producer known for his avant-garde theater works. Moby Dick is the fifth of his works to reach Shanghai audiences, following Lecture on Nothing (2017), Der Sandmann (2018), Relative Calm (2023) and Dorian (2026).

Bringing a condensed version of Herman Melville's 1,000-page novel to the stage is a big and difficult undertaking, Rommen said. Wilson invented a character, a boy, to pull everything together. "And in this way, we discovered different directions, different moments, different scenes," she said. Explaining Wilson's working style: he started with a structure, then found a way of separating it into pieces that could be filled with music, with movement, with thoughts, with color — or with no color at all.

Moby Dick was Wilson's final music theater work, and a specially invited program of the 25th China Shanghai International Arts Festival. Three performances took place from Oct 23 to 25.

Presented by Germany's Düsseldorf Theatre, the production transforms Melville's 1851 literary classic into a stage experience in which light, sculpted bodies and live music replace linear storytelling.

More than a dozen performers move through a black-and-white geometric space with whitened faces, stylized postures and precisely choreographed gestures. Light outlines silhouettes and shifting scales of depth, while footage from the 1956 film Moby Dick folds different media and eras into the stage picture. German actress Rosa Enskat plays Captain Ahab, distilling the obsession with revenge — not through psychological realism, but through physical form, voice and light.

Music is the work's other soul. Reuniting with Wilson after Der Sandmann, British avant-garde rock musician Anna Calvi wrote songs and lyrics that blend folk, sea shanties and rock. A live band plays throughout, its guitar, percussion and vocals driving the emotional tide while the visual composition remains tightly controlled.