Dance: The Long Road

William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppeteers bring Ulysses home.

Joan Acocella

NEXT WEEK, ON Nov. 14-16, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theatre, the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center will bring us an extremely valuable property, Monteverdi’s “Return of Ulysses,” designed and directed by the South African artist William Kentridge, who, in recent years, has wowed New York’s opera audience with his versions of Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and Berg’s “Lulu.” With him will come Cape Town’s Handspring Puppet Company, makers of the towering steeds for “War Horse,” and Brussels’s Ricercar Consort, with its passionate singers and its gleaming theorbo (a giant baroque lute) and viola da gamba. As befits an opera that is almost three hundred years old, Kentridge’s “Ulysses” has no truck with realism. The characters are nearly life-sized puppets, carved from wood. Standing next to them, and fully visible, are…

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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 7, 2016

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