‘Making Music out of Myth’ and ‘Letters of Refuge’
Arcade Space, Bush House, King’s College London, March 2023
Cheryl Frances-Hoad (composer, accompanist) and Karima El Demerdasch (mezzo-soprano)
Artist: Aida Silvestri
In the spring of 2023 King’s College London saw the installation of a new exhibition in its public Arcade Space, in Bush House. The exhibition was called Letters of Refuge, and it was organised by Dr James Corke-Webster, Reader in Classics, History and Liberal Arts at King’s. The exhibition displayed fragments of ancient letters preserving the voices of people who lived under the Roman empire, alongside contemporary letters composed at Art Refuge’s ‘Community Table’ on either side of the English Channel in Folkestone (southern England) and Calais (northern France). Letters of Refuge encouraged visitors to the exhibition and participants sitting at a reconstructed ‘Community Table’ to reflect on past and present experiences of persecution and displacement. It also included new works created in response to the letters: poetry by Josephine Carter, and visual art by Aida Silvestri.
A level students from La Sainte Union school discuss passages from The Penelopiad. Credit: C. Juckes
For the final day of the exhibition, the space was temporarily adopted by members of the Penelope’s Web project. In an exhibition dedicated to the fragile communications of those who are forced to travel thousands of miles away from their loved ones, we explored the voice of Penelope: the woman whose husband (Odysseus) and son (Telemachus) both leave her behind. We excavated the depths of anger that Penelope experiences, alongside the petulant tone of her complaints. We also spent more time listening to, and reconstructing, Atwood’s interpretation of the voice of the girls forced to labour in Penelope’s palace – that is, the female slaves who had also been trafficked far from their homes.
The participants in the workshop spent some time reciting the words of two choruses that Atwood composes. We tried reciting in unison, and as individuals taking a line or phrase each. Sometimes we followed the person next to us, sometimes we tried to hand over from one person to another by pointing. At James’ suggestion we tried reciting in the form of a round, with different voices chanting different lines at different times to create a rhythmic cacophony. We even ‘became’ owls, hooting and transforming our voices into those of birds of prey.
In the ‘rope-jumping’ chorus, a chilling riff on the girls’ execution at the end of Homer’s epic, it is the youth of the girls that Atwood emphasises. The girls’ childishly simple repetitions and rhymes designed to mimic a skipping game are undercut by the horror of the actual words that they deliver: the purely sonic dimension is deceptively anodyne, while the meaning is gruesome. As we chanted the poetry we noticed the gradual breakdown of the repetition and rhyme as the events described become ever more grotesquely cruel. It became clear that the loss of predictable sonic rhymes and rhythms contributes to Atwood’s point: the girls’ reliable solidarity and trust in each other, in each other’s voice, is pitted against the physical violence of Odysseus and his son, Telemachus – and, too, against the dubious allegiances of Penelope herself.
We found the most awkward passage of recitation at the very end of the last chorus, the last words of the novella, which we must assume are addressed by the girls to Odysseus:
Credit: C. Juckes
and now we follow
you, we find you
now, we call
to you to you
too wit too woo
too wit too woo
too woo
The school students in the room spotted the puns right away. We discussed the spelling that complicates the sound of oral recitation, and the students noted that the girls are not just owls (tuwhit tuwhoo) but also clever (too witty) and punished for having sex with the suitors (too wooed). The internal rhyme emphasizes the owl-like hooting (‘to you / too woo’), and we did our best to rehearse in our recitations this transformation from human to bird voice, this sonic metamorphosis. But we still struggled with the way in which the line breaks and the punctuation diverge, creating a syncopated feel that makes it difficult to recite either as a group or in the form of a relay in which one phrase is passed on to another. What is happening here?
According to Atwood’s description, the girls here in the underworld are transforming:
“The Maids sprout feathers, and fly away as owls.”
Athena and her owl. Lekythos attributed to the Brygos Painter, ca. 490–480 BCE. Met Museum NY.
Participants spent some time questioning why the maids might have become owls, and whether this metamorphosis was of their own choosing or not. One student brilliantly asked: why are they transformed into the symbol of Athena, Odysseus’ protector, when Odysseus brought about their deaths? Is this transformation about the continued dominance of Odysseus, who forces these enslaved girls – as he did in life – to play the part he assigns them? Or is there a more subversive dimension? Perhaps the girls deliberately transform into owls so that, as the symbol of Odysseus’ protector, they can forever haunt the hero who refused to listen to their voices in life. Perhaps they will follow him on every new journey that he takes. Perhaps their voices will continue to hoot in the background as Odysseus and Penelope tell and retell their story.
As part of the workshop there was a live performance of ‘Asphodel’ in the Arcade Space. Above you can listen to a short clip of the performance, with Karima El Demerdasch singing the role of Penelope and Cheryl Frances-Hoad accompanying her on the piano.
