Initiated by Ben Coonley, James Fotopoulos, and Spencer Parsons

BLUE THEATER:
916 Springdale Rd.

April 28th @ 8pm

TICKETS: $10
FILM/VIDEO/PERFORMANCE

Part 1: Herman Melville Hoot Nite

“Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from stranded fish... The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters.”

Every year, the New Bedford Whaling Museum conducts a “marathon reading” of Melville’s classic that routinely dashes the hopes and dreams of earnest high school English teachers across America against the jagged rocks of teenage hostility and indifference. Consisting of 135 chapters, the Epilogue, and an Etymology of Leviathan from antiquity through the early 19th century, the book takes 25 odd hours for a relay team of readers to perform for an audience without break. But even heroic wakefulness and a strong bladder are no match for the continuous unfolding of the narrative’s notorious discontinuity. So over the next three festivals, armed with cameras and artists’ reactions in place of harpoons, Fuse Box will endeavor to lay the unfathomable before you: 137 chunks of text, 137 separate films, and nearly as many individual film and video artists. “The classification of the constituents of a chaos. Nothing less is here essayed.”