Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria

After the production “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria”, a collaboration of Theater Basel with La Cetra Barockorchester Basel premiered in October 2021, six more performances will take place in February 2022.

This piece is about coming home - Ulysses finally reaches Ithaka after ten years of war and ten more years trying to find the way back to his homeland.

But what is home? For many of us this is a clear and defined place, others have mixed backgrounds or have lived in a different place for a long time, and might find it more difficult or even unpleasant to explain where or what home is. Then there are people who can not or do not want to return to the place they come from while others would like to define a new place as “home” but are not accepted by the people around them.

This question plays a central role in the concept and the staging of the production. In this version, Ulisse is not a person (his singing role has even been omitted from Monteverdi’s score and he is represented by live electronic music, quite a controversial decision!), but a group of people with complex or ambiguous backgrounds.

In general, the world of theater and music is very international: just a very small part of the people who work in this field lives in the country they were born in. Many of us are used to speaking an other language than our mother tongue most of the time.

La Cetra is present in the form of a continuo group (accompanying the singers from the orchestra pit) and a stage band consisting of two cornetti and a five-voice string consort, which I am a part of. We are positioned in a row on a 2 meters high metal shelf at the back of the stage which is moved during the performance.
While our musical contribution is not enormous (Monteverdi is never generous with instrumental ritornelli in his operas), we do play a visual role in the piece because we are always part of the scene, and we also perform some movements in reaction to the singers and actors on stage. Each musician is wearing a costume in “nude” shades that more less fit their skin colour.

Staging: Christian Lada. Conductor: Johannes Keller.
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