(or THE WRITERS’ ODYSSEY)

As this is intended for people who may not know much about us I am starting with a

Glossary:

TC (Tim Carroll): is the director
Round Two/ R2: a New Writing project we did a while back. The brief was to write a piece no more than ten minutes, using no stage directions, props, effects, and no more than 3 actors who, moreover, might be cast regardless of gender, age or ethnicity.
Intensive: short but full-time period of development/rehearsal (normally we rehearse sporadically.)
J’Oxley (James Oxley): is, let’s say, the Music Director of this project.
Nirjay (Nirjay Mahindru): a writer
John (John “O’Conolly” Donnelly): a different writer

And here is an Introductory Note.

When we began this project we knew we wanted a selection of ‘fixed elements’ in music, movement and text. We have reached a point where a clearer idea of what is needed is emerging.

So I am posting here, for the benefit of writers new and accustomed, what I know so far, and what I have noticed. This is to help get new writers up to speed and to clarify for writers who have been on board for a while, what has gone on. Shy writers might also dip in here for inspiration.

The more you (writers) can come to sessions the better understanding you will have of how text, movement and music might be used in performance. I hope each writer will be the best judge of what it is, in the active moment (of performance) that makes a written phrase, scene, monologue, poem, lyric or stretch of prose, elastic, robust and damned inspirational enough to be useful.

It is probably important to understand that while it is likely actors will learn entire pieces, as submitted by the writers, they may, in performance, only use parts of those pieces, according to what is required. This aspect becomes clearer after you have seen a few sessions. Like the parameters of the Round Two brief, some of which became rhetorical in themselves, this potential splintering of material may offer opportunities. (e.g. in R2, the audience’s understanding that this patently Asian, female character might be played by any actor became a restriction whose metaphorical value some writers exploited very boldly… among other examples). Choreography and music will be splintered similarly.

SCENES

Interestingly, we still have very few scenes. This may be because the Odyssey is, essentially, a one-man-show. Until recently I thought that maybe it was not conducive to being shattered into little scenes of a conventional nature in which Familiar Character A speaks to Familiar Goddess B. I thought the lack of scenes, and my own difficulty with writing scenes/ dialogue was a due to the nature of the material.
More recently, though, I think I am not trying hard enough as a writer to stick two Odyssean characters in a space and poke them with a stick.
During the Intensive, TC set the actors (and the writers present) a task in which we were to write a dialogue between two Odyssean characters who do not meet in The Odyssey.
Well. That showed where a little imperative can fetch us up. In a few days we produced a smorgasbord of lovely and unlikely scenes. These have been passed anonymously around the group to be edited. They will then be returned to their original owner-author who will improve further. Or scrap. More of this passing-around and committee-fying of these scenes might follow.
As you are probably beginning to sense, authorship is mashed, as is (authorial) intention.
Whether or not we finally use some of these (particular) scenes we can’t really know. They have been quickly written and it will be interesting to see where they are after a little polish and a communal mangle, but the exercise has been a good push at the sides of the story and the ways in which we might choose to tell it. It is good to get actors sweating over the producing of words.
We need Scenes, both encounters which happen in The Odyssey and others implied or utterly imagined.
They can, of course, be self-contained or dependent on an informed lead-in and out.


BOOKS

In this blog there is a chart which lists every book in The Odyssey. Each of these are to be edited to ten minutes. In this cut-down from, they will be read out to the audience. There are still books yet to be allocated to editors/writers. Feel free to choose one of those that remain. Cutting a book down to ten-minute essentials is a very, very good way of getting to know it.
The cut may be done in different ways: the books may simply be an edited version of the translation you have (this is the common approach); you could use more than one translation and mash them up; you could write your own adaptation.
However it is done, it needs to be faithful to the Homeric world and sequence of events but it is a cut: characters might need to be conflated, events excised or whittled down. The demand is simply that each book carries on from the previous book, delivers all necessary information (and preferably emotional charge), and joins onto the next.


EPITHETS

See Maddy’s fabulous blog of the session in which we began to work on using epithets and, indeed, in which we began to wonder what they were for.
This is perhaps the smallest and simplest writing task. It would be really useful to have a catalogue of syllable-perfect epithets for each character.
Even, perhaps especially, the smallest characters.


RECURRING EVENTS

The list of Homeric clichés famously includes phrases like: “wine-dark-sea”, “over the sea’s broad back” and “rosy-fingered dawn”.
Recently we collated a long list of events which occur through the entire Odyssey and which are often described, no matter which your translation, using the same words - often two to four lines’ worth of poetry. Most translators take their cue from the Greek and reprise these descriptions. This is a distinctive feature of The Odyssey. These recurring moments provide chiming patterns, milestones and opportunities for the story-teller to draw breath, slip in to auto-pilot for a moment, collect their thoughts, before playing the next domino in the pile. They can be extremely powerful and beautiful and simple.
They are also very, very useful to us as story-tellers having to think with our bodies and share a story in space. These patterns give us hand-holds and perspective. We will inevitably also come up with our own in performance, and many of those will not be verbal, either, but it will be lovely to give the actors a catalogue of these to draw on.
Here are a few examples: (this list is not exhaustive because that would simply not be possible, there are so many, the field is wide open):

• finishing eating and drinking ("when at last they had put aside desire for food and drink, they...")
• speaking foolishness (a character will exclaim, "What nonsense you let slip through your teeth!" whcih apparently in Greek uses the word for "hedge - the hedge of your teeth.)
• being washed ashore
• requesting and singing songs
• being bathed and rubbed with oil (usually leads to a transformation/ends a chapter of hardship)
• rigging ships and preparing to sail

SIMILES

Homeric similes tend to feature and are useful in ways similar to the recurring events described above. There are some magnificent ones, such as the description of Telemachus and Odysseus weeping when they are reunited or the description of Odysseus and his small crew decimating the suitors as they flee through the halls, that are enormous and munificent. They are like five-course meals compared to “…the generic event was like a generic object + optional adjective…” rhythm that we are used to in contemporary prose (and speech).
I said: the Homeric simile is like a five-course meal.
I am stretching a point.
But it is worth knowing that similes, their especially Homeric applications and their usefulnesses beyond the facile purpose of poetrifying otherwise colourless prose, is something we have worked on a lot as we look at this material and how to tell it.


LYRICS/ LIBRETTI

See all of J’Oxley’s blogs.
Any words we write may be taken down and used as a lyric for a song. But we will also want to have lyrics written especially for particular events, characters and moments (also, in particular, recurring moments).
At the moment we have a handful of lines which are useful in many situations:
Come into my bed
The storm is coming, ride the wave.
Come into my bed,
Odysseus the Brave.
The melody (and more detail about these things) is here. In the same post you will find a melody we know as "Sing" which we also use and decorate with lyrics as we need.

We have learned a couple of lines of The Odyssey in Ancient Greek. We will all eventually know more than a couple of lines. The Homeric hexameter is very distinctive but, as TC points out, it doesn’t work so well in English. There are other metres which we can use, and a range of rhyming patterns… whatever might catch your eye.
J’Oxley is thinking along the lines of our learning to weave together several types of song, and therefore sung words. Prose is as useful as poetry. Layers of these are also useful, perhaps written to go together. The actors have been invited to learn and use songs which, to them, are relevant to or inspired by the Odyssey and have come up with an enormous range of styles, from folk to show tunes via classical songs and arias.


SHOWCASE

I believe this is the most collective undertaking we have yet done. The Odyssey is the least hierarchical, least predictable, least charisma-dependent project we have yet approached. No single actor’s, writer’s or singer’s work is likely to emerge from the knitted whole in a single performance.
That is, of course, conjecture.
But it is worth noting.
As Nirjay said recently, when the project was all unwrapped for him: “…so I’ll just chuck stuff in and you’ll use what you want, right?”


LENGTH

A line may be useful.
A paragraph may be useful.
An entire book covered neatly and literally, end-to-end may be useful.
A short section or single event taken from a book may be useful.
An hour long academic monograph may be useful.
A feature-length film script may be useful.
Length will be entirely dictated by need. Do understand and enjoy that pieces may be cut, borrowed from or otherwise bawdlerised by actors, on the fly.


AUTHORIAL INTENT

Of course you may use stage directions and prop lists and the rest. The basic brief is the same as the R2 brief – but with added plastic. As any writer who has been to a session will have quickly realised, the requirements are very particular and the accoutrements of “conventional” scripting may never be helpful or used. Or they may be. The R2 brief, I think, continues to be a strong basis from which to write, not least because the discipline of specificity and active dialogue is so apt here. (I think it remains, in terms of parameters, strongly analogous to the specificity and positivity expected of the actors, but that’s by the by and another blog…)


RIFFS AND MISCELLANY

There was a session, early on, in which we were slowly working our way through an entire book as a company. The telling would be interrupted with each other’s: “I’d like to add a footnote here…” or with leading questions that allowed a little back-tracking to gather dropped plot-points; assorted sleights of hands and amnesties were employed as we walked, step-by-step, through the book. And John was scribbling away, as he does, until someone grabbed his pencil and used it as a prop and he, not finding it funny, chased the pencil around for a while until he was allowed to write again and at a certain (rather perfect, as these things go, and they do) point John had Simon read out what he had been writing and the voice, because something is being read, was a new voice, and the question that was being answered had gone cold, of course, so the words had a strange resonance that had not entered the room until then and the lines were perhaps more poignant because they were being read from John’s notebook and you know, listening, that the words are still warm and the hand-writing may not be entirely clear and there’s been no time for tidying and who writes by hand? But it was lovely because it cost nothing and it was a contribution in keeping with what John brings into the room and which we are used to receiving from him and it was, of course, special because when you hand over any word, whether it is spoken or written, it is a trusting gesture and when that gesture is not clicking Send but is a nudge and a handing over of a small notebook, it’s good. It’s not performance stuff, it’s just “here’s what I bring, try this…” And that, it seems to me, is the spirit in which we get our best stuff. It almost doesn’t quite matter what he wrote.
Though it is all written up here.

At the moment perhaps half of the submissions we have had from writers towards this project do not fit into any of the headings here. It is “stuff chucked in…” as Nirjay said or it is stuff entrusted - but not accounted. Some of it has a charm, a something, which has provoked an actor to sit and learn it and want to get it out and use it when they can and there’s nothing more exciting than seeing an actor steal your belongings and parade around as if you never owned them.


It is a vast play space, this project.
More than one writer has asked me simply to give them a task. I do not naturally work in imperatives, but I can stretch to dishing out orders if that works best for you.
If you are unsure where to start or what to contribute, ask me for a wish list and I’ll think of something.

I will, with each writer’s permission, soon post what we have, as it is signed off, in a Dropbox folder (or something) so that you can see what others are doing. Only company members would have access to this. We would eventually like to cover the entire Odyssey but there is no reason overlaps cannot occur, either. There is no definitive take on Sirens, Penelope, Circe’s pig-thing or Menelaus’ way with a sea monster. Though I imagine there is a certain appeal in being the first to beat a path.


Fed