Starting with the musical work and stage adaptation by Lancino, based on the « Ship of Fools » by Sebastian Brant, we offer a theatrical production lasting for about 75 minutes. It consists of a series of short musical pieces of 1 to 5 minutes, each related to an aphorism of this huge work and linked between themselves by a biting and vivid text, astonishingly contemporary. Declaimed by an actor, this work presented in its poetic and musical context, takes on a new dimension with this stage version. The imagination of the audience is all the more stimulated because the form offers a « flavorful » alternation between the text and the music, joining them sometimes.
One will find an exceptional combination of strong and modern aphorisms with very picturesque music. Composed by a composer five centuries after Brant’s writings, the music is often mocking and ironic, sometimes grave, following the text that it expresses and the wood engravings of which some are attributed to young Dürer.

This production, where love of music, words, voices, and images mingle in all their extravagant scintillation and from which emerges an imaginary world close to that of Jerôme Bosch. The original music inspired by the text, conceived according to the engravings, is enhanced by remarkable variety of instrumental and vocal colors.

The Audience embarks gaily or sometimes seriously on a vivid trip to the land of vices and passions.

The show has been premiered in Sebastian Brant’s hometown, Strasbourg, during the 1996 MUSICA International Festival which commissioned the work.

It is during the Carnival of 1494 that the “Ship of Fools” by humanist Sebastian Brant from Strasbourg (Alsace) was published in Basel. Consisting of 112 independent chapters, the work had an immediate and striking success and became one of the most widely read books of the 16th century.
The theme has been used a number of times since, for example the painting by Bosch “The Ship of Fools” (Le Louvre Museum, Paris), “In Praise of Folly” by Erasme, certain books from “Pantagruel” by Rabelais, some of the “Essais” by Montaigne, etc…

The work seems to be inspired by a tradition of Mardi Gras (High and Low Rhine), or real and astonishing village practices, described in “The History of Madness” by Michel Foucault. It shows all the fools of the region embark for the kingdom of folly “Narragonia.” Each one of the chapters is devoted to describing human follies, vices or passions. An engraving (woodcut) gives for each one of them a gripping image of the folly in question. Each plate is accompanied by a short description or moral or saying (popular or invented by the author). This text, in its lively versed version by Edwin H. Zeydel, particularly up-to-date, funny, disturbing, is devoted to depicting human excesses such as power, gossip, slander, adultery, conceit, rudness, flattery, etc …

In a mad rush superbly depicted, the fools throw themselves to the rails claiming their madness.