Phoenix Festival Playbill 2025 (1) - Flipbook - Page 10
THE ODYSSEY IN
ANCIENT GREEK: BOOK 2
Created and Performed by Joseph Medeiros
Place: Home
Time: Now
Run time: 60 minutes without intermission
Production Note
I 昀椀rst heard the sound of Homer’s language nine and a half years ago as it tumbled
naïvely from my own mouth.
It was only the 昀椀rst few lines of the 昀椀rst book of the millenia-old epic
narrating the triumphant, violent homecoming of the hero Odysseus,
Speak through me, Muse, about that wily, wandering man…
but I was shocked by what I heard. Why had no one told me the poem sounded like
this, that it was meant to be music?
I was similarly shocked six months earlier when I read the poem in its entirety for
the 昀椀rst time (in English).
I thought I knew what this poem was: the Cyclops, monstrous Scylla,
Penelope rooted to her marital bed… But I found so much more:
Demodocus, Theoclymenus, a mystical cave of nymphs…
Both content and form were far from any notions I’d previously held about the poem.
The more you know, the less you know, I guess.
And so, utterly bewitched by the music of the language, I decided in an instant, almost without thinking, to memorize the whole poem (all 12,109 lines) and perform
it in Greek as a 24-hour solo performance.
And this brings us to now. Today’s performance is just one small step in my rendering of this poem about parentage, this story about the slippery boundaries of the self,
and this hazy map for navigating the ever changing swell of community.
I invite you to listen, to give in to unknowing, and from there to reweave your image
of the world around you and your own fragile place in it.
Godspeed,
Telemachus
With Special Thanks to: Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, Morgan Rosse, Dan Stone,
Jane Abbott, David Rompf, Sara & Tom Rabstenek, William Parry & Maureen
Silliman, David Greenspan, C.C. Kellogg, and all the intrepid individuals who have
joined me so far on this long journey.
