Theaterlab presents Joseph Medeiros in The Odyssey Book 4: A Queen in Waiting as part of The Gallery Series. Joseph is memorizing Homer’s Odyssey in the original Ancient Greek and creating solo performances of individual books with the ultimate aim of performing the entire poem as a large-scale, 24-hour solo performance. He presents the text without simultaneous English translation, encouraging the audience to trust their intuition and fall into the language beyond its literal meaning. He does the first book of the poem in his living room for three people sitting on his couch. For book 2, he rides a box of props on the back of his bike out to perform al fresco in Central Park. He has recently begun performing book 3 in other people’s living rooms. The overall project strives to create idiosyncratic and unexpected renderings of a well-known (and well-worn) text in order to invite individuals to have fresh, and hopefully personal, encounters with it.
At Theaterlab, Joseph will work on book 4, which will include winding the clock back on pieces of the Ancient Greek text so one of the characters can speak in a reconstructed form of Proto-Indo-European and transposing other pieces of the text so another character can speak in Old-Norse forms. He will also explore a musical element that has not yet been incorporated into other books and ask key questions about transforming space and other methods of theatrical shapeshifting.
