"White Box," based on powerful images, premieres May 29

For “White Box” director Sabine Theunissen, everything started with a photograph.

In 2017, she spent a day at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, and viewed an 1897 photograph restored in 1930. It depicted three polar explorers – S. A. Andrée, Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg – stranded with a destroyed gas balloon.

The trio’s failed journey to the North Pole created a media frenzy in Sweden — and a great mystery — until the discovery of photos and Andrée’s final camp in 1930.

More than eight decades later, the expedition became Theunissen’s obsession. The photo, which shows the explorers in anxious positions indicating a knowledge of impending doom, inspired Theunissen to make a piece of art that reverberated with life.

“It was, for me, a way to reward these explorers and a way to give life back to those images,” she said, “with the dancers and performers being alive in this picture of transparency.”

And now, the play’s U.S. premiere is May 29 at Spoleto Festival USA.

History, grief unfold in reverse

In “White Box,” for which Theunissen also serves as set designer and the writer of the dialogue, the historical tale is told in reverse chronological order and blends dance, music, film and a puppet with a camera that moves around on stage.

The original plan was for Theunissen to proceed with a project relating to Andrée’s trip, but the Covid-19 pandemic dashed any hopes of bringing that to fruition.

Around the same time, she said her father became ill and it became clear to Theunissen that he was nearing the end of his life. In the final weeks before his death, she talked with her father, a photographer himself, about his full life story — in reverse chronological order.

“He started to tell me his life in a very systematic way, like chapter by chapter, as if he were reading a book,” Theunissen said. “And every day, he would tell me a story a little bit further back in time.”

As Theunissen had these experiences with her father while making the work about the 1897 expedition, she knew she had to go backward “to get out of the logic of these events.”

“Because they could regard it as a documentary or like a report, but I wanted to transcend that story in a different way, in a poetic way,” Theunissen said. “And going backward gives a different logic, a different meaning, a different dynamic.”

Movement tells the story

Before Theunissen adapted “White Box” into a play, she made an animated short film about the story as a starting point for the theatrical production. And as she wanted to find a way to portray the three men’s journey to death dramatically, she added dance from the very beginning of the process.

Theunissen remained fixated on the puzzle of the photograph, and having dancers explain this so-called mystery felt far more interesting than dialogue. She tapped Gregory Maqoma to choreograph for the two dancers in the play, Thulani Chauke and Fana Tshabalala.

Initially, Maqoma didn’t connect to the story — until he learned more specifically about Strindberg, the photographer on the journey. Maqoma found the idea of placing the pieces together through Strindberg’s photographs the most interesting.

“They were living traces of themselves through the lens of a photograph and I found that more fascinating than the exploration itself,” Maqoma said. “It was, for me, dealing with memory, which is very much part of my exploration, part of my work. I always refer to memories of the past in order to understand the present and, perhaps, to predict the future.”

A frozen journey reflects a warming planet

Maqoma said he found distinct parallels between the Swedes’ inability to find their way through a harsh environment and how man-made climate change has caused places like the North Pole to begin melting.

Dancers Chauke and Tshabalala improvised to reflect this fragility of nature and of the environment.

“Just watching these two bodies floating in space and kind of being propelled by the wind,” Maqoma said, “It’s never-ending, in a way their fate is never-ending.”

The obsession, also, seems never-ending for Theunissen. After years of navigating challenges, including a global pandemic and the death of a family member, the process does feel rewarding. But the creative urge for something new is similar to how she first became entranced by the photograph.

“The feeling is that I miss something, I miss something, I miss doing something now,” Theunissen said. “I love to do a new project, of course, but I need to find the same trigger.”

IF YOU WANT TO GO: “White Box,” 7 p.m. May 29; 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. May 30; and 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. May 31, Emmett Robinson Theatre at College of Charleston, 54 St. Philip St.

Henry O’Brien is an arts journalism and communications graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.