Combining song, story, history and movement as we return to live performance, What Lies Beneath is a site-specific and immersive experience aboard the historical Wavertree, built in 1885, and used as a cargo ship before being acquired by the South Street Seaport Museum in 1968. This immersive musical experience invites small groups to travel around the ship’s main deck to hear and see vignettes intended to connect audiences to the complex and tragic stories surrounding American maritime history, both through the enslavement of African people and through novelist Herman Melville’s tragic heroes. From the enticements used to lure Africans into enslavement to Captain Ahab’s final moments of moral reckoning aboard the whaling ship Pequod in Moby Dick, What Lies Beneath is a series of six unique vignettes, including:
1619: A SONG CYCLE
(East Coast Premiere)
by Damien Geter