I've just been through as rather wonderful creative process with Douglas Kenning—a popular Bay Area storyteller and professor of Greek myth and theater—that I wanted to share. He and I are about to stage "The Loom and the Ship—a twice-traveled Odyssey" a spoken word/music performance in which Penelope muses on marriage, love, seduction, gender, and violence. I have written twenty spoken word (lyric) poems to perform with music, I weave these poems into Douglas' performance, as he tells Odysseus' story. I have also written text for a three person koros, a stunning group of female singers which sings as the sirens, speaks as the gods, and raises a Balkan wail for the foolishness of humanity. It is a strange and perhaps daring thing to write for Penelope, as writers and listeners have "known" her for thousands of years. So I am sharing my thoughts on the process.
I wanted to collaborate with Douglas because he tells a great story, and he knows this one inside and out. We both wanted to work on an anti-war piece, and to also dive into multi-layered myth. Odysseus speaks for everyone, as he is beset by his own pride, violence, depression and doubt; and finds his way home through humility, bowing to the gods and fates, and an encounter with innocence and grace.
Penelope is half the story, although Homer gives her few words and tells very little about her life. At first I thought I would adapt the story to contemporary life, rant against war and absent fathers, but, after two years of study, research, and writing, I saw a more familiar story was already present.
In Penelope's time, life was considerably different at first glance: the men of the islands were always at sea, fishing, raiding neighbors, settling disputes, and the women attended to business at home, agriculture, spinning, weaving. All politics were organized through brute force, and people—women, especially—did not think of themselves as individuals. Women stayed together to avoid danger. Their forms of public expression were prayer, ritual, and lament.
However, many things have not changed so much: the pleasure of communal work, elements of childbearing, sexual longing, seduction, so I wrote about these. And Penelope's response to war particularly intrigued me. The women's lament, their only form of political participation in ancient Greece, was increasingly silenced in later years—. It was disruptive, and—similar to contemporary photographs of war, and government restrictions— the ancient lament for the dead undermined that other public song—the song of the glory of war.
In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope sleeps through violence. I began to see this as a literary silencing of the women's lament. So in THE LOOM AND THE SHIP, I put the war lament back in, and let the women sing it. I also retrieved the histories of the goddesses who heal Odysseus as he returns, histories ancient women would have known, and I added my personal interpretation of the night thoughts and musings of the woman who waits at home. ". .. And here is the strange ambivalence. Men are men, and life is dear, and blood-drops sow new bloodshed, with an ancient and well known guilt, . . . but still, I wish to clear my house of those sorry years, secure my wealth and my home . . . "
To keep the themes and words both ancient and contemporary, I have dropped in lines I found moving and wise from ancient Greek poets, playwrights, and philosophers. We also invited three singers to sing and chant with Penelope, to invoke the community of women, and we wanted to keep the set spare and simple, to allow the audience to form their own imagery from our words.
