The Gift of Performance
Modern Bards, Playing Homer
As I write about in today’s Pasts Imperfect , it is really hard to think about the importance of audiences and performances for making meaning with epic poetry. In addition to anthropological fieldwork, one of the best things we can do is listen to artists and performers, especially those who are breathing life into old poems today.
I reached out to four people who have been performing Homer in different ways over the years and here are some of their reflections.
Joe Goodkin has been performing songs based on the Iliad and Odyssey for years
When I read the Iliad as an undergrad at University of Wisconsin-Madison and learned that the text almost certainly originated in song performances by generations of itinerant bards, I wondered at how those performances looked and sounded.
I didn’t have to get far into that other Homeric epic, the Odyssey, to get a good idea.
“[The suitors] were sitting calmly,
Listening to the poet, who sang how
Athena cursed the journey of the Greeks
As they were sailing home from Troy. Upstairs,
Penelope had heard the marvelous song.
She clambered down the steep steps of her house…
In tears, she told the holy singer, “Stop,
Please Phemius. You know so many songs,
Enchanting tales of things that gods and men
Have done, deeds that singers publicize.
Sing something else and let them drink in peace.
Stop this upsetting song that always breaks
My heart, so I can hardly bear my grief.” [WILSON, 1.325-341]
In book 8, Odysseus experiences another bardic performance.
“So sang the famous bard. Odysseus
With his strong hands picked up his heavy cloak
Of purple and he covered up his face.
He was ashamed to let them see him cry.
Each time the singer paused, Odysseus
Wiped tears…” [WILSON 8.85…]
What is lost when musical elements like pitch and rhythm are removed from a text? When a story goes from a live dynamic performance to being a fixed artifact? When it is taken out of the collective environment of audience and performer to the solitary environment of a reader? What can examining and experiencing epic’s generative format of performance help us better understand about the texts we read?
Just a few years after I graduated with a BA in Classics, I set about exploring these questions by (re)setting Homer’s Odyssey to song. The result was a 24 song contemporary bardic folk opera called Joe’s Odyssey. I went into detail about my process and the first decade of performing my Odyssey in this 2016 article for Eidolon, On Being a Modern Bard.
After over twenty years and almost four hundred performances of Joe’s Odyssey (and having added a song version of the Iliad called The Blues of Achilles), I can speak to what I’ve experienced and observed about the musical and performance aspects of epic and how these experiences have broadened my understanding and appreciation of Homeric texts.
First of all, musical elements of performance like dynamics, tempo, pitch, and rhythm activate audience emotions in different ways than text alone because they are processed in different parts of the brain. In “How Your Brain Listens to Music” by Larry S. Sherman and Dennis Plies, the authors observe that while language comprehension takes place critically in Wernicke’s Area, “the cerebellum is essential for understanding changes in tempo when listening to the beats in a piece of music.” Additionally, “major and minor chords are processed by different areas of the brain… where they are assigned emotional meaning…” Maybe most tellingly, “the areas of the brain that process music are both directly and indirectly connected with parts of the brain that influence our emotions,” in particular with the limbic system, in contrast to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for language processing.
What are the ramifications of these missing musical components for how the epic texts we have today relate to the performances that created them? I liken it to the difference between taking in ancient statuary in its current bleached pure white form and not with the bold coloring that was often part of the original presentation. The human voice and other musical elements enter the brain via different paths than text and this has consequences for the capacity to evoke emotion and meaning. Taking away these elements fundamentally changes the way an audience receives and processes a story and there are features of the text that are legacies of rhythm and pitch but do not harness their power and impact. In my performances, I have experienced that reintroducing musical elements creates (or recreates) powerful emotional reactions in audiences that complement and sometimes even supersede textual meaning.
Second of all, taking in a story in a group in real time amplifies the opportunity for human connection and empathy around the characters and their experiences. Seeing someone react to a story emotionally is powerful and has consequences for other listeners, which we see in the Odyssey: it is Alcinous’ observation of Odysseus’ emotional reaction to the bard’s song that leads to the opportunity for Odysseus to tell his own story. These vivid “second generation” reactions to stories (reactions to the reactions of other audience members in real time) do not exist in a text-only format with the same intensity they do in performances. I have witnessed this phenomenon firsthand in audiences, in particular in the discussions that follow my performances.
Third of all, a performance environment has the effect of lessening differences and foregrounding commonality. At a time when the divisions of society at large are evident in the field of Classical studies and in the online world of social media, sitting in a room face to face with other humans, taking in a story and reacting to it has the potential to help negotiate differences and find common ground. I have performed epic for almost every conceivable type of audience from many walks of life and in doing so I have seen that Homeric epic in performance provides opportunities for audiences to transcend differences and experience a shared humanity. When we take in epic in our silos, these opportunities disappear or are more easily muted. More than once I have performed my Odyssey in the company of and at the invitation of individuals with whom I know I disagree strongly about a wide range of issues, but we have been able to, even if briefly, experience connection in the performance of, discussion about, and shared enthusiasm for Homer. Just like Achilles and Priam are able to, even if briefly, set aside their differences and share in a meal and their humanity.
As someone for whom reading Homer in Greek was a transformative and emotional experience, I am grateful that we have these durable texts so many millennia after they were composed and written down. I also think it is important to remember that they are necessarily incomplete artifacts and present us with only some of the information ancient audiences received. My experiences reintroducing these missing aspects to modern audiences have allowed me (and I hope my audiences) to feel more of the power and humanity of these stories and understand to an even greater degree how and why their creation, telling, and retelling, echo through time.
“After [Odysseus] finished, all were silent, spellbound,
Sitting inside the shadowy hall”
Odyssey 13.1-2 (trans. Emily Wilson)
BIO:
Joe Goodkin is a Chicago-based singer/songwriter with a BA in Classics from UW-Madison. He has performed his original song retellings of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad over 450 times in all 50 US States, Canada, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Ireland. He has released 13 albums of original music under his own name and the name Paper Arrows, most recently a collection called Consolations and Desolations produced by founding Wilco drummer Ken Coomer. His Classics-related musical work has been supported by awards and grants from ASCAP, the SCS, and CAMWS.
Bill George has been bringing the Odyssey to the stage since the ‘end’ of the COVID pandemic
Coming out of Covid, I was angry about any number of things. As a theatre artist, pain is an important motivator for me, and love, but the pain of two years of isolation with little more than computer screens to connect to family, friends, co-workers, I longed to be in a gathering with others, to feel their breath, hear their voices, share a laugh or a cry – the mysterious and vivifying feast of community. Not in a huge crowd, but in an intimate small circle, with the wonders of nature all around – fire, water, the earth and sky. I needed to connect to my ancestors, the dead, and even the generations ahead if that were possible. The big questions had fallen upon me – what does it mean to be a man? a woman? how can we heal as a people from this endless fighting and waywardness?
I thought I might be able to exorcise those demons from out my soul, or at least some of them some of the way, through a rendering of the story of The Odyssey, and I began a two-year investigation of the text, four or five translations, and went in search of Odysseus, the man.
It’s necessary to be brief here, so suffice it to say there are treasures within Homer’s miraculous text that are not immediately apparent, ones that require not just a working of the text for them to appear, a clearing away of the debris, but a working of the audience as well, so they might be able to see.
For instance, to speak to one point of just one dimension: time. When reading a text, one can stop, put it down, come back to it in a day or a week or a year…but in live performance time’s a monster always breathing down your interpretive neck. I’m told that The Odyssey grew from an oral tradition, and that makes sense—its shape, the way it moves, its tidbits along the way to please the audience. To do a solo performance of it these days requires a raft of old and new techniques to hold today’s audience: rhythm changes, creative use of space, changes in vocal qualities, employment of various narrative styles or modes. But more to the point, any good performer will tell you that theatre is much more than the recitation of a text. The text is, as they say, only the tip of the iceberg.
Our perception of time here in the West is cut into small pieces. We’re always in such a damn hurry, deeper perceptions must struggle to surface from our unconscious. Originally, in order to get to the spirit of the work, I toyed with the idea of doing a rendition over six hours long—but fairly quickly realized that, even if I could manage it, it was just too much to ask of present day audiences. Still, if I’d been able to practically command an audience over such a lengthy engagement…it wouldn’t be just a question of the audience getting “more” with the longer performance—more words, more story; they could experience something exponentially different: authentic ceremony. By virtue of the ripping of our time expectations, which, in part, is what the work asks for, the performance would be empowered to move past “story” towards a living act of sacrament—a genuine calling and meeting with the gods and demi-gods, with the spirit of Odysseus and humanity itself.
An English Literature degree from Lehigh University in hand, Bill studied for his MFA with the great Paul Baker at the Dallas Theater Center and went on to several years of study with the master, Paul Curtis, founding genius of the American Mime Theater in New York City. Co-founding People’s Theatre Company in 1976, he, his wife Bridget, and colleague Lorraine Zeller-Agostino went on to found Touchstone Theatre in 1981. Then, striking out on his own in 1990 to explore “theatre of transcendence”, Bill began Kingfisher Theatre, returning to Touchstone full-time in 2003. Now, roughly fifty years since the creative journey began–newly minted in 2022 as Touchstone’s first Ensemble Member Emeritus–he and Bridget, with their two children, Anisa and Sam, have established a cultural center, Little Pond Arts Retreat, as a refuge for artists and all who are interested in the intersection of creativity, spirituality, and harmony with Nature. It is here where Kingfisher Theatre continues and Bill has his home.
Jay Leeming has been performing parts of the Odyssey to all sorts of audiences
For some years now I have been telling the Odyssey aloud to audiences in theaters, elementary schools, and colleges. I tell the story in the traditional way, which is to say I tell the events of the epic in improvised language created anew for each performance. I do not memorize the words, but the events of the story. Despite the lengthy history of memorized performances of Homer, there is no doubt that this is how the epic was first brought to life. This experience has completely changed my relationship with the Odyssey, transforming the single brilliant path of Homer’s language into a wider landscape that can be traversed in almost endless ways.
There’s a radical difference between reading a story in a book and hearing it aloud. One of the most important differences is that improvised language can respond to the moment in a way that scripted language cannot. Homer’s description of the island of the Lotus-eaters, for example, remains the same in all circumstances; but my description of that same island changes in response to the mood of the audience, the performance location, and even the season of the year. From the silences, gasps, and laughter of the audience I learn when to follow the story into laughter and when to let it sink into sorrow. In this way the audience teaches me about Homer in a way that no written text can.
Surprisingly, this experience does not distance me from the Odyssey as we know it but puts me into deeper relationship with it. Time-honored Homeric phrases such as “when they had put aside desire for food and drink,” for example, take on new resonance when used to maintain the audience’s attention while I figure out what to say next. This returns these phrases to their true function, so that they become necessary both to story and storyteller alike.
This intimate relationship with the Odyssey in performance can also lead to surprising discoveries. Homer steps lightly over the first meeting of Odysseus and Circe, for example, but early on I could tell audiences felt something was missing. Looking closer, I realized that Circe’s exclamation that “Surely you must be Odysseus!” (X.330) presupposes an undescribed story by Odysseus that he is actually someone else—an insight that would not have occured to me without the promptings of a live audience.
In addition, moments in the text which once felt carved in stone now reveal themselves as choices no doubt made in response to a particular audience at a particular time, choices that can be questioned, honored, or changed. Does the audience want to hear about two encounters with man-eating giants, or are they content with one? (Exit Laestrygonians.) Can the audience handle a detailed description of the sacking of Ismarus (IX, 39-61), or does the story feel grim enough already? The requirements of live performance are beautifully ruthless, and often alter the story in ways I never could have predicted.
To tell the Odyssey aloud can be a giddy, frightening, and joyous experience. On stage there’s no book to turn to, no numbered pages to guide the journey but only the images which arrive and then depart again like the waters of some thousand-year-old river which lives only in its flowing. That flow of images feels like the story’s true home, and it is accessible to all of us. Open your mouth and let the story jump out: begin, O Muse, where you will.
Filmed excerpts of Jay’s Odyssey performances (6 minutes total):
Lynn Kozak has moved from the classroom to performing Homer in bars
Do you love the Iliad? Like real-deal fan-person geeking-out, crying on tiktok, love, love the Iliad? Maybe not. But I do. Just thinking about it, I can feel it in my body. Call to mind one of my favourite deaths, living rent free in my head, and there’s that hollow tingling, all through my chest, deep in my guts, that slight choke creeping up into my throat. Then I hear the gently scolding direction — ‘keep the emotion out of your voice!’ If you say the words, if you tell them well, they’ll know how to feel.
In 2018, I performed the whole Iliad in a Montreal bar. It was a live, serial, improvised translation-performance in English, with a different director and around an hour of text each week. It took me 29 weeks. The next year, I performed a version of the Odyssey’s Apologoi, with about two hours of text in a single performance. Someday, I hope, I’ll get to back to performing Homer—I'd love to try to do the whole thing in a long weekend, like so many scholars have suggested rhapsodes used to do it.
When you’re telling an audience the Iliad, you begin to understand how much you just want to get the story across. You know what it was like? All those Achaians, marching, their bronze armour glinting? It was like seeing a terrible forest fire raging down from the peaks of the mountain... you know how they sounded? Like every kind of water bird suddenly gathering in a meadow, honking, shrieking, quacking—can you hear how loud they were as they marched?
Different words and phrases come and go; are they moods? Different narrators’ voices? Do you remember the Achaians? You know, the ones with the awesome shinguards (especially in Iliad 3, and 7!)? No, wait, remember the Achaians, and their great hair (especially in Iliad 2, but also in 7!)? You remember the Achaians. Yeah, I know you do. But performing I realise that I’m as fickle as the narrator I’m playing. The narrator wants “nice shinguards” for this bit, but I say “great hair”, no idea why I’ve got hair on the brain.
Sometimes these gaps open between me and the narrator; but other times I feel like we’re one and the same. That poet performer had an audience and I’ve got an audience and we’re telling the same story, and, damn I can see it too, I can see what they saw, and I can tell it, maybe like them. But no, not like them—I can’t do metre. Sure, I improvise, too, but that means I tell the audience I’m not sure I want to translate that that way, or I can explain Homeric language, or even something like supplication. But I also get stuck and forget where I am (did that ever happen to them?) or worse, once I skip a bunch of lines between two lines that are the same, and I don’t even notice (did anyone notice?). Don’t even ask about the catalogue. And sometimes I don’t want to say what I have to say—I value myself more than a tripod.
And of course you don’t stay the narrator—helpful formulae pivot me in and out of characters. Now I’m Agamemnon! Now I’m Achilles! Now I’m Odysseus. Oh god, I’m still Odysseus. I look forward to being both Atreidae—Agamemnon all puffed up, my inner Chicago-guy, mustached, plain-speaking and brash; Menelaus, a mensch, empathetic, even in his most violent warnings. The gods become more interesting. In truth, each character that I become becomes my favourite in the moment.
I get to change the space we’re in, transforming the bar all around us, week to week. Sometimes the great wall of Troy is there, now here. Time, too, feels funny. After one performance, someone asks, ‘what happened with that fight between Achilles and Agamemnon?’ In performance, especially this serial performance, I go weeks without mentioning them (weeks 4, 5, 8, 9, 13...), and when it is mentioned, it’s fast— blink (or yawn, or go to the bathroom, or get another drink), and you miss it.
The Iliad is a gift; performing it reveals as many endless new facets as performing any other performance text does. For me, what I love the most, is how the text inhabits me, pushes out every conscious thought for an hour or so as somehow this story, this ancient story, this story that’s so brutal and beautiful and awful and awesome in the way English doesn’t even allow, deinos, this story becomes all that’s happening in my voice and in my body, between me and a hundred other people. I can’t wait to tell it again.
Lynn Kozak works on archaic and classical ancient Greek literature, as well as its receptions, translations, and comparisons with contemporary texts. After their monograph, Experiencing Hektor: Character in the Iliad, released in 2016 with Bloomsbury Academic (Experiencing Hektor open-access) compared the Iliad's serial poetics to those of contemporary North American narrative television, they have also continued to work in television and media studies. From January-August 2018, Kozak translated and performed the whole Iliad in weekly serial instalments, as part of an FRQSC-funded project "Previously On...The Iliad"; all performances are available to view on youtube. They also performed a version of the Apologoi from the Odyssey as part of the 2019 Festival Interculturel du Conte.
Suggested Further Reading from LK
King, B. & Kozak, L. (2022) “#Patrochilles: Find the Phallus,” in The Routledge Companion to the Reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Gender and Sexuality, edited by Kenneth Moore, Routledge, pp. 41–57.
Kozak, L. (2021). “Re-considering Epic and TV.” Sens public, https://www.sens-public.org/articles/1477/
Kozak, L. (2023) “Happy Hour Homer: On Translating and Performing the Iliad Live in a Bar,” in This is a Classic, edited by Regina Galasso, Bloomsbury Academic, Literatures, Cultures, Translation Series, pp. 51–8.
Macintosh, F., & McConnell, J. (2020). Performing epic or telling tales. Oxford University Press.
Macintosh, F., McConnell, J., Harrison, S., & Kenward, C. (Eds.). (2018). Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press, USA.
Ready, J., & Tsagalis, C. (Eds.). (2018). Homer in performance: rhapsodes, narrators, and characters. University of Texas Press.
Ready, J. L. (2023). Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad. Oxford University Press.
Scodel, R. (2009). Listening to Homer: tradition, narrative, and audience. University of Michigan Press.
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