Penelope was created as an epilogue to Odysseus by the Royal Flemish Theatre: a 24-hour piece in which the integral Odyssey was told by 24 men. Once all the verbal commotion made by the 24 men telling the story of the Odyssey had stormed across the stage, Lisbeth Gruwez presented a wordless reply of the purest simplicity: for twenty minutes she conjured up in dance all the sidelined women of the Odyssey, and thereby offered all these men a response.
To the eternal cycle of male violence, she gives a feminine counter of commitment and reconciliation. She deploys a unique combination of movement and standstill into the form of a spiral: a figure that is simultaneously limited and unlimited, collapsing and expanding, and also a reflection on time not as linear, but as circular.
Gruwez dances Penelope in complicity with Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, her established partner at Voetvolk, who developed music that both underpins and challenges the solo—like a sort of counterpoint.
Together, they briefly solidify time, either on a theatre stage or in the public space.