The Return of Ulysses: ballet, the absurd and dancing in flippers

The Royal Ballet of Flanders has gone on its summer holidays. But before they disappeared I caught the company’s final performance of the 2008-2009 season in Bruges, Belgium, and spoke to the ballet company’s artistic director Kathryn Bennetts.

The Return of Ulysses was the dance performance with which the Antwerp-based ballet company chose to round off their season and the one that it’s taking to the Edinburgh International Festival this August.

The choreography is a combination of classical and contemporary dance; the music switches between Henry Purcell and songs from the 1950s and 1960s such as those of Doris Day; and the costumes are all black for the protagonist Penelope and her many suitors, and a gold skirt suit for the goddess Athena and flippers, goggles and a tutu for Poseidon. It’s a performance of contrasts, one of “light and shade,” as Bennetts put it.

The story of the return of Ulysses is related from his wife Penelope’s perspective. It has been 20 years since Ulysses left to fight in the Trojan wars and in those intervening years of seemingly endless waiting Penelope has fought off many suitors – to various degrees of success, in the eyes of the choreographer Christian Spuck, it would seem. Penelope is subjected to a fair amount of aggressive male behaviour on stage but the suitors’ competitiveness and jealousy of each other means that Penelope is ultimately the one with her pride left intact.

Bennetts sums up the narrative as “an absurd story”, pointing to the absurdity of Penelope waiting for her husband for so many years and then not even recognising him once he finally does return home. The choreographer wants “to express the absurdity of things: the absurdity of the suitors' struggle for power, the absurdity of the gods who do not heed the laments of humans, the absurdity of Penelope endlessly waiting and the sardonic irony of her failing to recognize Ulysses,” as the Royal Ballet of Flanders says on its website. Unsurprisingly perhaps comparisons have been drawn with Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’.

Bennetts dedicated the performance in Bruges to Pina Bausch, the German choreographer who had died just a few days earlier.

To read more about this performance and another Flemish company going to the Edinburgh Festival, click here.