MOONSTRUCK: In Praise of Shadows

"Who cares about the stature of man when we can go to the Moon?" asks Hannah Arendt. Ariel Efraim Ashbel & Friends' new production MOONSTRUCK: in praise of shadows takes Arendt's question as a thematic springboard to delve into the dark side of the Renaissance and the territorial expansion of Western colonial powers that accompanied it. Long before the current space barons flew to the moon, it served Columbus or the Spanish conquistadors as a projection surface, a phantasmagorical colony. Inspired by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's essay In Praise of Shadows, MOONSTRUCK: in praise of shadows celebrates the performative potential of darkness, its textures and nuances, in an interplay of performers, light, object and sound. The light and shadow sides of terrestrial lunar addiction meet on a madcap journey through a rugged terrain of reflecting surfaces that is as strange as it is humorous. While shadowy robots dance to soft harp music, Martha Graham and Queen Isabella exchange endearments in the twilight. no apocalypse not now (2019) is followed by MOONSTRUCK: in praise of shadows, a thunderous show full of cosmic weather changes that evokes fantasies and mirages of Western humanism to ultimately confront them with the reality of this planet we call home.