The 2009 Quotable Spring Arts Guide
We spotlight this season's bright stars. And they had something to say about it.
By Steve Wiecking and Christopher Werner
CLASSICAL
Modern Myth
Seattle’s early music scene benefitted when scholar and musician Stephen Stubbs came home in 2007 after three decades in Europe. He founded the Seattle Academy of Baroque Opera, then mounted a thundering production of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s 1600 The Play of the Soul and the Body at St. James Cathedral. This March his Pacific Operaworks chamber company debuts with revered South African artist William Kentridge’s 1998 take on the Monteverdi opera The Return of Ulysses (Il ritorno d’Ulisse).
It’s not your ancestor’s Monteverdi. The dying Ulysses lies in a hospital bed in modern Johannesburg remembering his life’s epic adventures. He and the other characters are portrayed by elegant, large-scale puppets manipulated onstage. Nearby, live singers give them voice as video graphics projected on a screen provide further illustration of Ulysses’ world and internal struggle. Eight vocalists include Cyndia Sieden (recently the Queen of the Night in director Julie Taymor’s The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera). Five players from South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company travel from overseas to participate in the show—as does Kentridge himself, who’ll be here to supervise the remount. Ulysses journeys to San Francisco after its West Coast premiere here. And Stubbs? He’s happy to have come back and discovered that “my interests and the possibilities of the city are in sync.” —SW
March 11–28, Moore Theatre, 206-628-0888; more info
"My wife and I went to South Africa on a holiday and asked to meet William Kentridge. I’ve musically directed all three of the Monteverdi operas, but Ulysses is the most difficult—partly because of its epic scale and partly because of the special effects required. I discovered that Kentridge had brought the opera into the new century. It very easily projects the sense of the epic, and you can achieve the stage magic because the puppets can do things that humans can’t." —Stephen Stubbs, Pacific Operaworks artistic and musical director
“The god Giove comes to take a hand in the affairs and fortunes of Ulisse, and as the singer sings the lines ‘I release thunderbolts’ we project an image of what appears to be a lightning strike, but in fact is an angiogram—a lightning strike inside the body.” —William Kentridge, director
“It’s more like a sung play. The dramatic possibilities are much greater than perhaps many modern pieces. I’m anticipating that the expressive demands on the voice will be greater in this role because we won’t be acting the roles ourselves. We can’t use our faces because the audience will be watching the puppets.” —Ross Hauck, “Ulysses” in The Return of Ulysses
Published: February 2009
