TODAYulysses (2001)

Credits:
By and with Jan Ritsema and Bojana Cvejić
Produced by Kaaitheater, Brussels

Program notes

TODAYulysses proposes a travel on diverse thinking-routes utterring speech-acts that don’t point to the world by way of pictures but to the world of the words themselves. One sees two different bodies stirred by performing texts, which stumble, fall, stop, stammer, drip, flow, eject, evade or suspend the death-end in one meaning.

Press quotes

TODAYulysses proposes a travel on diverse thinking-routes utterring speech-acts that don’t point to the world by way of pictures but to the world of the words themselves. One sees two different bodies stirred by performing texts, which stumble, fall, stop, stammer, drip, flow, eject, evade or suspend the death-end in one meaning.
TODAYulysses is a discourse on the possibility of a theatre performance in an age when the use of signs is subject to inflation and the visual media have supreme power and colonise the conceptions we have of the world. Cvejić and Ritsema therefore reduce the theatre setting to its absolute elementaries: the audience, the actors’ bodies, and words. A man and a woman, two genders, two different worlds and attitudes, which in the acting space enter into a sort of dialogue. Everything that happens occurs in our minds.

Gerald Siegmund, Frankfurt Algemeine Zeitung

One could compare TODAYulysses to an inner thought process. By this I do not mean an unspoken reasoning starting from a particular formulation of the problem and which is intended to unravel and solve it. An inner thought process is more a semi-spontaneous, reflexive occurrence in which arises a network of notions, whereby one cannot say exactly when it started nor when it finally ended.

Judith Wambacq, Etcetera, Belgium

TODAYulysses simply is not a performance. It is a subtle and highly vulnerable combat in words, with the boundaries between the fictional and the real, the planned and the unplanned, always unclear. It is a sort of speech that does not draw conclusions but leaves everything open. No one meaning is able to dominate another for longer than a single moment.
Is this still theatre, or is it pure reflection, or just some theory? That is the question that has been in my mind for days. And the attempt to form an answer to this question is repeatedly blocked by the fact that it is in fact totally irrelevant. Of course it is theatre. It is theatre that has reduced itself to the status of a logically asked question.

Tom Rummens, De Morgen

Jednostavnost i otvorenost u izvedbi, ležernost u prebacivanju s jedne nakupine značenja na drugu daje predstavi neodoljiv šarm novog iako ne i nepoznatog, a gledatelju se na trenutke čini da je sve izvedeno pitanje trenutačne inspiracije.

Lidija Zozoli, Slobodna Dalmacija