Throughout Homer’s Odyssey, the hero’s wife Penelope stays at home while her husband returns from the Trojan war. Her long wait, refusing other men’s advances, and passing the time by weaving, is one of the inspirations behind Penelope Sleeps, an opera in essay form by Mette Edvardsen and Matteo Fargion. By ‘essay’, the artists intend to present a performance in which opera is the starting point, without any of its traditional grand gestures and narrative.
Penelope Sleeps is less a re-telling of an important part of The Odyssey, but more about the abstract relationship between voice and music, space and scale. Edvardsen’s interest in language, and choreography and music as language, leads her to explore Penelope’s inner voice and interior world, a mythical doorway to a place beyond narrative and destiny.
Presented in collaboration between Black Box teater and Ultimafestivalen
+ Oslo Kulturnatt
13. september 22.00. Free entrance
Mette Edvardsen & Matteo Fargion: Notes on blue
As an appendix to the piece they have just made together, Notes on blue contains outtakes and afterthoughts, in text and in music.
Text: Mette Edvardsen. Music: Matteo Fargion