> jim,
> once we agreed on a choice of scenes and persons and we choose to have
> a
> chronical story and not the way homer tells it
> have a look on the texts in http://www.oudeis.org/arts.html or the
> archives
> of course there can be additions! any suggestions?
My suggestion is for AE and it includes practically everything that
oudeis is *not* doing--except the Land of the Dead, of course. I've seen
two movies that tried to stage Polyphemus and the results were
ridiculous. Anyone who knows any physics knows that scaling in gravity
is not as simple as superimposing little pictures on big pictures. I
think the hope is that Polyphemus will be sort of like King Kong without
hair.
Why do moderns want to do this? I don't understand it. People have
enough trouble imagining the gods, but Polyphemus--why is this guy,
Odysseus, lying to us, expecting us to believe patent nonsense? The
question sort of misses the point, doesn't it? But choosing the episode
invites the question. I mean it's not really about a 20 foot human. Or
is oudeis saying that that *is* what it's about? The verbal story tells
so many other things. The Phaiakians were driven out of their dancing
fields by the Cyclops. But they were children of Poseidon. Odysseus is a
mixed bag for them in some ways.
I think you have your work cut out for you if you expect an audience to
go along with this without some kind of preparation. What I figure to do
on the evening of the 12th is to fill in some of the gaps that will be
left by performances that focus very briefly on the exotic and
strange--Cyclops, Calypso, twenty years of in absentia marital fidelity.
I personally find a lot in the Odyssey that is more familiar to me as a
human being than this stuff. There was a whole generation of
anthropologists who chose to introduce new cultures to their readers by
showing them strange and bizarre customs. The assessment in retrospect
seems to have been that it was a patronizing and fearful approach to
other cultures. We don't have to go on making the same mistakes. It is
possible to lose your way solving the merely technical problems. Oudeis
is an important project to undertake, but not because it might
contribute something to the gizmology of the internet. It will be
important if and only if it shows us something that we have forgotten
about being human beings. The rest is just means to an end--gadgets.
I wonder if anyone on the list can tell me how many extant plays we have
from the Greeks that are made out of material from the Odyssey.
-- Jim Terral South Slocan, BCaka Boris... http://www.netidea.com/~cyberhut/proposal.htm