The stage is awash with bodies tumbling, lifting and clutching. Then, out of the darkness and gnawed by nostalgia, the Greek hero Ulysses appears after twenty long years of war and wanderings. Will he reach his faithful wife Penelope before she succumbs to her suitors?

Il Ritorno is Circa’s ground-breaking new work co-commissioned by Brisbane Festival, fusing Circa’s world-renowned stripped-back acrobatics with baroque opera. Over 80 taut minutes, it retells Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno D’Ulisse in Patria intermingling it with folk song and new compositions and percolating it through the lens of Primo Levi’s post WW2 European displacement.

At the core of Il Ritorno is the hunger to return home – saturated with loss and war, powered by longing and haunted by the past.

Il Ritorno is created by circus visionary Yaron Lifschitz in collaboration with composer and arranger Quincy Grant and is performed by an outstanding cast of singers and accompanists who join the famed members of Brisbane’s own Circa Ensemble. Il Ritorno is deeply moving, utterly human and a profound hymn of togetherness.