German premier

Molly Bloom verbally weaves a network of relations, memories, fantasies and illusions. Her husband Leopold Bloom dances through the day. She tells of the apparently mundane, about her life, of love and of her body. He sleeps soundly – and he also sleeps with her, intervenes with single-minded purpose, moves and creates. Her mental journey starts and finishes with a glance at him, a look of inner reflection in which past, present and future events blend. Molly Bloom is Penelope and Leopold Bloom is Odysseus – or is it vice versa …

During the ten year-long siege of Troy, Odysseus invoked Poseidon’s curse on himself, an evil spell that doomed him to ten years of wandering meander. His wife Penelope waited twenty years of his return and rejected the advances of the countless badgering suitors, until Odysseus returns and slays all of them without being recognised.

The »Odyssey« is regarded as the first European »novel«. It was written by Homer, presumably around 700 BC, and it is doubtlessly even today the most favourite of all ancient literary works. On it rests the famous »Ulysses« of the Irish author James Joyce (1882-1941), one of the most significant and complex books of our century. Published in 1922, it is a witty monumental piece of literature, adventure story and humorous-ironical language spectacle lumped in one text.

The last chapter of »Ulysses« contains the fascinating story of Molly Bloom/Penelope which the choreographer and dancer Bert Gstettner chose as the textual basis of his identically named production. Jointly with Andrea Sommerfeld, one of Austria’s independent scene most glittering and heterogeneous performers, emerged a production that is far closer to a stage play than to a dance. It belongs to the best Austrian productions of the last few years and for its first time is now shown in Germany’s new provinces.