Monteverdi with puppets: “The Return of Ulysses”

William Kentridge: artist, sculptor, animated film maker, stage director, visionary artist marrying one form to another, eschewing boundaries. Stephen Stubbs: lutenist, teacher, performer, concert and opera director particularly of the Baroque, founder and director of Pacific Operaworks. Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa: sculptors of puppets, inventors, stagers and performers of shows for children and adults. And Monteverdi: towering 17th century Italian composer, creator of opera as we know it.

Put the first three together with all their multiple creative skills and you have next week’s revival of Monteverdi’s 1641 opera “The Return of Ulysses” in Kentridge’s original staging from 1998, presented by Pacific Operaworks.

In it, Kentridge has taken the opera’s prologue, an argument over Ulysses’ future between Human Frailty, Time, Fortune and Love, to highlight the underlying theme of the opera: the human vulnerability and heroism which pervade Ulysses’ vacillating hopes about whether he’ll ever get home to his wife, Penelope, and what he will find when he gets there after 20 years away.

Close your eyes, and you will hear a straightforward, period-perfect, well-sung performance of Monteverdi’s opera. Open them, and all sorts of nuance and ideas flit before your eyes, literally, as Kentridge’s animated charcoal drawings, Xrays conjuring up the internal human, photos from space, and more come up on a video screen behind the stage.

At front of stage is a hospital gurney with a huddled figure on it. While the figure, breathes and occasionally moves, it doesn’t speak, it’s just there throughout the opera,. The figure is Ulysses in extreme old age, dying in modern Johannesburg, and the opera is the memories of his long journey home.

The figure is a puppet.

Sculptor Adrian Kohler of Handspring carved these lifesize puppets from wood, hollowed out to be very thin so that the puppeteers can hold the weight up for the length of the opera (which has been slightly shortened to enable this). Asked how he chooses what sort of face, Kohler says he always has his eye out for photos of interesting faces which he can use. In “Ulysses,” he says, the head of the shepherd is modeled on the composer Stravinsky, sticking-out ears and all. The models for Penelope and Ulysses come, appropriately, from ancient Greece and the dying Ulysses is an aged version.

However, Penelope’s three suitors are 17th century gallants, as Kentridge has set the opera in three eras and places: today’s Johannesburg, Monteverdi’s 17th century Italy, and Homer’s Greece.

Puppeteer Brian Jones, together with Kohler a founder in 1981 of Handspring Puppet Company, describes how tiny details make puppets come alive.

“With puppets, you have macro movement, ‘he says,” that’s the stage direction. Micro movement is, for instance, the way we pick up a glass, or bend forward to get up off a chair.” The puppets mimic those movements exactly.”It’s based on breath, and the result becomes a transcendant experience rather than everyday. The puppets strive for life, in small movements.” Five puppeteers of the company have come for this production.

Watching a “Ulysses” rehearsal, where each puppet is manipulated by two people, the puppeteer and the singer, the three merge into one as we watch it. The singer has to remember not to upstage the puppet while singing and manipulates one of the puppet’s arms; the puppeteer holds the puppet up taller than he or she is, and manipulates the other arm, the head and anything else.

For this production, the eight singers are people with whom Stubbs has worked. Many will remember tenor Ross Hauck who sings Ulysses and Human Frailty, and took over the role of Nero in the Early Music Guild’s terrific production of “The Coronation of Poppea” a couple of years ago. Baritone Jason McStoots as Giove and a suitor, and mezzo-soprano Sarah Mattox as Melanto and Fortuna also performed in”Poppea.” Soprano Cyndia Sieden graces both early and modern opera these days, and here sings Amore and Minerva. Laura Pudwell’s rich mezzo-soprano makes a strong Penelope in the short exerpt heard in this rehearsal.

Stubbs himself on chitarrone (great bass lute) heads the group of eight instrumentalists, again many known to Seattle’s early music devotees, such as Ingrid Matthews and Tekla Cunningham, violins, Margriet Tindemans, viola da gamba, and Maxine Eilander, harp.

The five performances take place at the Moore Theater at 7.30 p.m., beginning March 11. Tickets are $40-85 at 206-292-ARTS or www.ticketmaster.com

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