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Thursday
Apr 12 2012

Odyssey, Odyssey, Odyssey

The poster -- only in first draft, so not quite there yet.  Still coming along, as is the work of performance preparation.  Jennifer and I are now in the midst of attending small group sessions, our next-step follow-up to the two day workshop held in January for tellers, one and all (see the blog entitled Yes, It Works below).

First -- as we get together -- come the questions.  Pronunciation is a biggie – Eurycleia?  Aeolus?  Eurymachus?  Right now it’s time management that looms largest on everyone’s horizons, however.  We have our listeners with us from 10 in the morning until 10.30 in the evening.  During that time, we’re offering eight and a half hours of telling with short breaks at the end of each one hour set and longer spaces for lunch and supper.  We simply cannot afford to go beyond our overall deadline.  That means no one – but NO ONE – can take more than their allotted portion for their piece.

Homer doesn’t make that easy.  The text is so rich, all of it has a purpose, all of it seems so necessary to the telling of the tale.  That makes cutting painful, even if it has to be done.  We have to work too with such respect.  Ultimately, the task is to cut and still leave the audience feeling that nothing has been omitted, to make sure we keep enough of the wondrous descriptions, similes, repetitions, images to communicate the fullness of the tale.  It isn’t easy but it is possible, so fear not.

Questions of cutting always lead us deeper.  Always we find ourselves talking about issues of characterization, setting, plot.  Each teller only has a part.  It’s becoming up to Jennifer and me to help each one remain in constant awareness of the whole.  Yes, Telemachus does start out in Books 1 to 4 as very much a boy, but in Book 15 he returns from his voyage of searching for his father as a man.  Yes, Odysseus leaves Troy as a “sacker of cities,” a man of war still, but he does gain in humility as all that he has is taken; as he finds himself washed up upon some foreign shore naked and near death.

As the questions end, we begin to follow the paths opened as each teller presents the small piece of text he or she has chosen to bring.  I think we are all of us amazed at how much has been achieved by this “small piece” process.  I know the decision to work through small pieces came really out of a sense of necessity and was made with some reluctance.  I imagine the tellers were skeptical.  I know neither Jennifer nor I fully anticipated what has evolved.  We did not see as clearly as we might have how the need to look so closely at “a mere five minutes worth” would have such carry overs -- how the fact of paying attention to a ship’s beaching here would make us look at other matters of sailing; how the revelation of Odysseus’ soldier past for one of the teller would help others; how the subtleties of dialogue between a swineherd and a hero would alert us to potentials in other talk.  More then than we could have hoped, the “small pieces” are building the strength of the broad sweep.

Biggest thrill?  The means by which everyone is growing in delight with regard to what is at hand.  I knew I wanted to do this but I did not know that it would bring me pleasure equal to anything I have felt ever in my hugely pleasurable working life.  I studied The Odyssey in university – fumbling my way through Books 5 and 6 in the original Greek.  The Odyssey was the first work we took on when we started our epic tellings almost twenty years ago at Rasputin’s Café.  I’ve come back to this great epic over and over but I’ve never before had the opportunity to work on it in the company of others so intensely or for  so long.  Doing so is like a dream beyond imagining.

News soon of promotional efforts and of how you can buy tickets.  Date and place (in case you can’t see the print on the poster): June 16 at the Fourth Stage of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.  We know already we have one audience member making the journey from Halifax.  Truly we can say this is something no story lover will want to miss.

As if all that’s not enough? Jennifer and Katherine and I will be performing Dragon’s Gold show again in the next couple of weeks.  Full details: http://2wp.ca/dragons-gold/

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