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| Revival of Monteverdi’s IL RITORNO D'ULISSE |
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 As with the 1998 production, the Handspring/Kentridge partnership will again work with Philippe Pierlot and the Ricercar Consort and a group of seven opera singers. In Kentridge’s version of Monteverdi’s work, Ulysses is no longer in Ithaca. Instead, he lies reminiscing in a Johannesburg hospital bed. His romantic return to Penelope has become an epic dream that intersects not only with classical Greece but also with Monteverdi’s Venice and contemporary South Africa. Il Ritorno d’Ulisse was first performed in 1998 at the KunstenFESTIVAL des Arts in Brussels. There were performances for the King and Queen of Belgium and the Queen of the Netherlands and the production also toured Berlin, Zurich, Lisbon and to Pretoria and Grahamstown in South Africa. |
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| Il Ritorno d’Ulisse revival By Claudio Monteverdi Director: William Kentridge Musical Director: Philippe Pierlot Puppets: Handspring Puppet Company First performance May 1998 at La Monnaie/De Munt (Brussels) Commissioned with funding from KunstenFESTIVAL des Arts La Monnaie/De Munt The Flemish Government Wiener Festwochen (Vienna) Produced by: La Monnaie/De Munt (Brussels), Handspring Puppet Company (Johannesburg), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna) and KunstenFestival des Arts Puppet Design: Adrian Kohler Puppet Makers: Adrian Kohler, Tau Qwelane Puppeteers: Adrian Kohler, Busi Zokufa, Tau Qwelane, Fourie Nyamande, Basil Jones Singers: Furio Zanasi (Ulisse), Kristina Hammarström (Penelope), Atala Schoeck (Melanto/Anfinomo), Marek Rzepka (Nettune/Antinoo), Elise Gäbele (Amore/Minerva), Jan Kobow (Telemaco/Pisandro), Mark Adler (Eumete/Eurimaco/Giove Musicians: Philippe Pierlot (musical director and viola da gamba), Giovanna Pessi (harp), Kaori Uemura (viola da gamba), Emmanuel Balssa (viola da gamba), Rainer Zipperling (viola da gamba ), Eduardo Egüez (theorbo and guitar), Wim Maeseele (theorbo and guitar) Animation: William Kentridge Assistant Animators: Anne McIlleron & Nina Gebauer Film Editing: Catherine Meyburgh Picture and video research: Gail Behrmann Costume Design: Adrian Kohler Costume makers: Sue Steele, Costume Department of La Monnaie/De Munt, Phyllis Midlane, Murray Weyers Set Design: Adrian Kohler, William Kentridge Original Lighting Design: Wesley France Stage Manager & Video Operator: Kim Gunning Company & Tour Manager: Wesley France South African Producer: Basil Jones |
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| Ulisse: The Body Drawn and Quartered For some time now I have been drawing and using in my films, pictures based on different body imaging techniques. These range from X-rays to CAT- and sonar scans, and magnetic resonance images. While these images themselves have not been the subject of the films or pieces of theatre they have appeared in, they have been central to them. The origin of the images is twofold and I think twofold banal. The images were around the house, present in the textbooks and medical periodicals of my wife. They were not hunted out, rather stumbled over as found objects. But secondly, equally dumbly, was their appeal to be drawn. They met the drawing process halfway. These images are already half-drawings, the reduction to black and white, and tones of grey. The smoky transitions in X-rays, the discrete marks of a sonar scan, the diagrammatic clarity of an MRI all translate if not effortlessly, then certainly naturally into charcoal and paper equivalents. The blunt stubby marks of a stick of charcoal makes of itself the marks, codes dots and dashes of a sonar, a brush of charcoal dust is an immediate transliteration of an X-ray. To do the same in oil paint, or pen and ink, would be an act of dissimulation. Ulisse: a prologue The opera Il Ritorno d’Ulisse follows Homer closely and recounts Ulisse’s return after the Trojan war, his routing of the suitors who have besieged Penelope in the palace on Ithaca, and his reuniting with Penelope. What Monteverdi and his librettist Badoaro added was a prologue in which the attributes of Human Frailty, Time, Fortune and Love dispute over what will happen to Ulisse. It was this prologue with its central theme and image of the human as vulnerable rather than heroic that brought me to do the opera. Throughout the opera there is constant shifting both in the words and in the music between Ulisse’s optimism that he will prevail and a fatalism that everything will be too hard. The prologue set a tone and established a central set of images of the body which found their way through the opera. The process of making the opera took approximately a year - eight months of making drawings and editing animation film. Over the same period of months Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company designed and carved puppets, Philippe Pierlot and I worked to edit down the opera both in terms of the length of time the puppeteers could hold the puppets and to focus on the themes of vulnerability and heroism that were central to the production. This was followed by months of rehearsals with puppeteers in Johannesburg and with the whole company in Brussels. What we Know and What we See While working on Ulisse I had occasion to take my five year-old nephew for a chest x-ray. The child was stood at the machine and positioned using a video screen next to the x-ray machine. On the video screen you could see the moving skeleton of the child, the incredibly fine and fragile collarbones, the thin pylon of the spine and in the jaw not just the child’s teeth, but also the adult teeth still on the bone, waiting to erupt. The vulnerability and the process of growth as the continuous act of transition. These are all things we know. What this video screen did was make apparent these things we know. What the video showed was not just an inside of a body but also a series of generally invisible processes and associations. (This moving between what we see and what we know seems to me the area in which visual artists, filmmakers, operate.) Mars - been there, done that These images of the body that were re-prompted by the prologue of the opera, sonar, X-ray, MRI, CAT-scan, are different from either external images of the body or even anatomical paintings or photographs of dissections revealing a body. They are by their very nature, internal images. Dissect as deep as you like and you will never find the mimetic reference of the sonar. They are already a metaphor. They are messages from an inside we may apprehend but can never grasp. In their separation from the apparent they come as reports from a distant and unknown place. By contrast, for example, the photographs sent back to earth from Mars a year ago are quite remarkable for their familiarity. I know Mars, it is outside Colesburg in the Karoo, midway between Johannesburg and Cape Town. I’ve drawn that landscape. The astonishing thing about Mars was how local it was. But our insides on the other hand are a planet far further off. Far less familiar to our gaze. We can’t use a familiar photographic translation of image to the world, but have to work through a further code. And it is this further distancing (which may be the result of the technology of the imaging devices – that is not the point here) which seems to me to be an accurate and appropriate way of elucidating our relationships to our bodies. Herding a reluctant ox We have an uneasy relationship to our bodies. John Updike refers to us as ‘the herders of our bodies, which are beasts as dumb and bald and repugnant as cattle.’ We prod them along, hoping they will not suddenly go off on their own, leap a fence, wander onto the highway. They are ours, but also other. Machado de Assis in his wonderful book, Epitaph of a Small Winner ?describes it somewhat differently. The ageing hero is at a party. I returned to the salon, danced a polka, intoxicated myself with the lights, the flowers, the beautiful eyes, and the light hum of conversation. And I became young again. But half an hour later when I left the ball at four o’clock in the morning, what do you think was waiting for me in my carriage? My fifty years. There they were, uninvited – not benumbed with cold nor rheumatic, but dozing off their weariness, eager for home and bed. The Internal Lightning Bolt Part of this preparation involved looking through a series of medical videos. These were of operations, barium meals, gastroscopies, angiograms, arthroscopy, and so on. One of the most remarkable for me was an angiogram – an X-ray image of dye being pumped into arteries around the heart. As the dye is released in one heart beat, in one pulse, it suffuses and turns black a jagged tracery of the arteries. I had always assumed these to be gently curving aerodynamically, or at least ergonomically designed. But the vessels are stepped, jaggedly forked. This piece of film was put aside and sat as it were on the editing room shelf waiting to find its place. It was used early on in the opera. The god Giove comes to take a hand in the affairs and fortunes of Ulisse and as the singer sang the lines "I release thunderbolts" we projected an image of what appears a lighting strike, but in fact is this angiogram, a lightning strike inside the body. A Libation to the Gods Which is where we are today. Not directly in awe of the Greek gods but still at the mercy of forces about us. The world which is beyond our control, and to protect which sacrifices and libations must be made, is now internal. The fear of Giove’s lightning bolt is lessened by the invention of the lightning conductor, but we still live in fear of the internal lightning bolt, the heart attack or other calamitous internal failure which we can at best, try to avoid. We can try to placate our insides - but ultimately of course we are at their mercy and will be destroyed by them. So instead of burning oil in the temple we make daily devotions to the treadmill or stair machine at the gym (or don’t, and invite the wrath of the gods). We ingest our offerings, our calcium, anti-oxidants, we give up for lent, for good, butter, red meat, cigarettes (or don’t, and invite both the risk of doom and the opprobrium due the blasphemer). We are at risk internally and externally. Both are other. What then is the extremely thin line between the external and internal lightning bolts which we feel to be our own? This paradox and question became the guiding theme for the production; and set against this vulnerability, the utopian courage of Ulisse and all mythic heroes. William Kentridge October 2003 (adapted from a lecture first given in late 1998) |
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| From The New York Times 4 March 2004 “Ulysses is sick. He lies in bed, in twisted sheets, breathing shallowly. But Ulysses is made of wood. He's the protagonist of Monteverdi's opera "Il Ritorno d'Ulisse" as presented by the Handspring Puppet Company at the John Jay College Theater on Tuesday night, and the steady rise and fall of his breath as he lies racked by feverish dreams of reuniting with his wife is quiet testimony to the skill and detail of the production.” For full review click here: New York Times |
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MELBOURNE,
Australia: 13 to 17 October 2004