Following on from his celebrated Ulysse, which returns to the stage again this season, Jean-Claude Gallotta continues his exploration of mythological figures with a new show entitled Pénélope. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries various writers and poets have undertaken to revisit the character of Penelope with a view to freeing her from the timeless representation of a woman faithful to her long-absent husband, slave to an unrealizable tapistry, and virtuous to the point of cunning in her attitude toward male lust. In the mind of Jean-Claude Gallotta it makes every sense to broaden our view of the Homeric epic and to probe it from the point of view of Penelope herself.
His intention is to re-invent the traditional figure with a renewed status, that of a protean representative of all women. Simultaneously his ballet Pénélope pays hommage to a choreography that stages playfully the architecture of space and where symmetry, perspective, ensemble steps, entrances and exits, and the multiplicity of centers are all explored in Gallotta’s own inimitable way. In other words, as always, his choreography is replete with sensuality, physica interlacing, ironic detachments and saucy insolences. Gallota’s Pénélope is conceived as the mirror opposite of his Ballet Blanc Ulysse. It is, so to speak, a « Ballet Noir », black on black, playing with all the rythmes and nuances that this color intimates. Again, his intention is to show the very light that inhabits a shadow, the glimmers and gleams that traverse a darkened soul, the secret energies which spur the living being to persevere in her effort regardless of what may arise.
C.-H.B.