Penelope: Waiting, Weaving, Imagining

Penelope is often reduced to a single image: that of the woman waiting for her husband, who has gone off to war.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus has been absent for nearly twenty years. While he travels, fights, and struggles to return to Ithaca, Penelope remains in the palace with their son Telemachus. Numerous suitors, convinced that Odysseus is dead, seek to marry her.

To resist them, Penelope — who is every bit as cunning as Odysseus — devises a trick. She announces that she will choose a new husband once she has finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. But every night, she secretly unravels part of what she has woven. In this way, she buys herself time.

This very simple gesture — weaving by day, unravelling by night — particularly interests me.

Because Penelope is not simply the one who waits. She acts. She devises a strategy to preserve her freedom in a situation in which she seems to have no power at all. In doing so, she becomes a creator.

Weaving Time

The thread then becomes a way of measuring waiting.

Each repeated gesture transforms time into matter. The ball of yarn unwinds, the fabric takes shape, and then it is undone. Something moves forward and backward at the same time.

This contradiction is what interests me in Penelope: she is caught in waiting, but she is not motionless. She creates time.

Weaving thus becomes a metaphor for memory, waiting, and perhaps also for the story itself — and for the way it is passed on.

What has been built can be undone. What seems definitive can still be taken up again.

A Penelope Who Imagines

In my work around Penelope, I am also interested in what happens during the waiting. What do we do with the absence of another person? What becomes of someone who waits for years for a person without even knowing whether they will ever return? Is Penelope truly waiting for Odysseus, or is she waiting for the idea she has created of him? And what if waiting eventually began to produce its own images?

This is where the boundary between reality, memory, and imagination becomes particularly interesting.

Is Odysseus still present in Penelope’s mind? Has he become an imagined figure? A ghostly presence? Or has his absence become so immense that it eventually comes to occupy the entire space?

A love story has become a text. Odysseus and the suitors are protean figures, both from the creator’s perspective and from that of the spectators, who transform Odysseus and the suitors into allegorical chimeras of their own lives.

From Penelope to The Weaving of Fate

It is from these questions that The Weaving of Fate was born.

Here, I take up the figure of Penelope again, but I am not seeking to retell the story of The Odyssey. Rather, I seek to enter into her waiting and into what it may produce within her. The thread becomes a stage material, as well as a companion in movement and gesture.

The ball of yarn unwinds like the passing of time. The body moves through different emotions. Waiting can become hope, anger, doubt, desire, disillusionment, or even a kind of breakdown.

Penelope is no longer simply the woman waiting for Odysseus to return.

She becomes a woman confronted with her own story, her own projections, and the possibility that what she hopes for may no longer correspond to what actually exists.

Perhaps this is where the true vertigo of Penelope lies for me: what happens when waiting becomes more real than the person we are waiting for?

This is the question I continue to explore through theatre, textiles, and images.