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A very Homeric day
The theme for this year's Chicago Humanities Festival is Peace and War: Facing Human Conflict, so naturally there are a great many programs dealing with Homer's most famous of all war poems, the Iliad. Yesterday I went to three of them.
The first was poet Stanley Lombardo reading from his translation of the poem. He gave us the first several lines in the original, and then read in English the death of Hector, to the accompaniment of a small drum. Then Derek Collins, professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, lectured on how the Iliad was performed in classical Greece. Very scholarly and technical, but interesting all the same, particularly following Lombardo.
Then last night I went to a performance by the Aurea Ensemble of War Music, a contemporary rendering of the Iliad by the poet Christopher Logue, with music by Paul Phillips. The actors played multiple roles and wore basic clothes (jeans, casual clothes, etc.), the only costuming being a long indigo-tie-dyed piece of cloth that one actor draped around herself when she was Thetis, and which was also used to represent the sea at one point. Three of the male actors doubled female roles (Athene, Hera and Aphrodite) and camped it up quite a bit, which at first I thought was weird but then decided it worked, because, as Shakespeare knew, a bit of levity in the midst of tragedy is good theatre. And this was an extraordinarily powerful retelling of a powerful story. My one criticism was that the venue didn't work with the staging, at least if you were on the first floor. Because the room was flat, and the stage only slightly elevated, that part of the action that was played on the floor of the stage was difficult to see (and I was only in the fifth row)! Lots of craning of necks. That was unfortunate, because in detracted, particularly at the end, with Achilles lying on the ground cradling the body of Patroclus in his arms.
Tonight, Shakespeare.
The first was poet Stanley Lombardo reading from his translation of the poem. He gave us the first several lines in the original, and then read in English the death of Hector, to the accompaniment of a small drum. Then Derek Collins, professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, lectured on how the Iliad was performed in classical Greece. Very scholarly and technical, but interesting all the same, particularly following Lombardo.
Then last night I went to a performance by the Aurea Ensemble of War Music, a contemporary rendering of the Iliad by the poet Christopher Logue, with music by Paul Phillips. The actors played multiple roles and wore basic clothes (jeans, casual clothes, etc.), the only costuming being a long indigo-tie-dyed piece of cloth that one actor draped around herself when she was Thetis, and which was also used to represent the sea at one point. Three of the male actors doubled female roles (Athene, Hera and Aphrodite) and camped it up quite a bit, which at first I thought was weird but then decided it worked, because, as Shakespeare knew, a bit of levity in the midst of tragedy is good theatre. And this was an extraordinarily powerful retelling of a powerful story. My one criticism was that the venue didn't work with the staging, at least if you were on the first floor. Because the room was flat, and the stage only slightly elevated, that part of the action that was played on the floor of the stage was difficult to see (and I was only in the fifth row)! Lots of craning of necks. That was unfortunate, because in detracted, particularly at the end, with Achilles lying on the ground cradling the body of Patroclus in his arms.
Tonight, Shakespeare.