At SIFA, 'Moby Dick' is a folk horror tale

Familiarity breeds apathy. Not when the hackneyed hunt for Moby Dick gives you emotions you're unfamiliar with when it appears on a stage larger than life with eerie textures and an indie spook score.

Plexus Polaire's radical transformation of the 1851 Herman Melville epic landed with an outsize splash in the water when it opened the recent Singapore International Festival of Arts: A real echo of the drama fair's self-afflicted-nature-eats-man theme at once immediate and brooding in its quotidian wild chase, sinister puppets, and bogeys shrouded in black.

We know the story, except that the whaling ship is adrift in an ocean where the sun does not rise.

There are only but a handful of human sequences in Plexus Polaire's iteration, in the guise of the voyage's sole survivor Ishmael, who takes the audience to the vengeful expedition of a puppet crew led by a rash and sad sailor Ahab, who lost a limb to a whale, in a great darn hurry to meet his demise.

On stage, the high-speed hunt is constantly drum-driven, adrenaline-hit and on the edge, sometimes as mythic a quest as following a large search party after the legendary big foot, sometimes as oblivious of its mortality as John Wick after gangsters killed his puppy and stole his car.

Moby Dick finally rears its ugly head and a series of ensuing tussles morph into a graceful walloping ballet.

Here's when the audience could finally taste the maple syrup.

For the briefest of hours, puppets are men in their lower nature, fluid in sensuality, and infinite in their desires.

The French-Norwegian company has been regaling classic literature with its onstage adaptations of the Swedish novel The Faculty of Dreams, Dracula, and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House, each with a dash of every art form churned in the blender.

A cast of seven actors, 50 puppets, live music, and immersive video projections made Moby Dick almost a stop-motion cinema in form, whose charm relies heavily on artistic cuts and camera movements as an emphasis to a scene, an appeal to emotion--something its ensemble of synthetic performers should be devoid of.

What's occult and daring aren't strange bedfellows in Moby Dick's unsettled soundscape.

Accompanied by brilliant curtain improvizations and puppeteering, it transcends an otherwise limited stage and leaves to the imagination what otherwise can't be physically there.

Suddenly, the ocean is alive.

In its depth and scale, it portends constant danger, as if you're marooned in a sinking ship or you're a mere speck in the water, holding on for dear life until it swallows you whole.