Working with movement.
If you follow us on Twitter, you probably already know that a couple of weeks ago we held our longest session yet of research and development for our ongoing project looking at queerness in the myth of Orestes! We contended with intense temperatures and even more intense emotions brought on by working with such a moving and often traumatic story, but in the end we were really pleased with how it went.
The musicians respond.
The majority of the members of the company were present in the room, along with some external collaborators: academic Nancy Rabinowitz, and musicians Vivienne Youel, Gemma Storr and Sam Blenkin. This meant we could work really well in our signature collaborative way, with the whole team working together to come up with, produce, and improve ideas that led to a quintessentially By Jove piece on the final day! We also wouldn’t have been able to do it without the generous support of our funders: Arts Council England, William Jackson Food Group, the Institute of Classical Studies, the Hellenic Society, and our wonderful Patreon patrons! And a shout-out also needs to go to Centre 151 in Hoxton, our hosts for the week, who were really supportive and whose lovely spaces remained surprisingly cool during the hottest days of the year.
An intimate moment with Artemis and Iphigenia.
Prior to the week’s work, the company had produced a large quantity of text over several months of development. This was curated into a working pack by the project’s head writer Wendy Haines. On the first day’s session, the company explored the story of the myth of Orestes, working with the narrative of the myth itself, improvised storytelling exercises, and boiling down the texts we had produced to the most crucial scenes for telling the story. On the second day, the company began working with movement, led by movement director Susanna Dye. The musicians also arrived and began to respond to the work we were creating. Two scenes were strung together to form a short narrative.
Electra and Pylades work out their issues over tea.
On the third day, we continued movement work and staged further scenes, identifying a structure for our piece built around three sections, each focusing on Orestes and Pylades, Iphigenia, and Electra. On the fourth day, we constructed and worked on the central narrative of the show; we also sourced necessary props and costumes. On the morning of the fifth and final day, we finalised a few aspects and ran through the entire piece. In the afternoon, we hosted two sharings to invited audiences, who provided us with really helpful comments and feedback.
Sibling complications: Orestes and Electra.
The piece that we produced was about 45 minutes long, and blended movement, music, and text to explore the lives of Orestes, Pylades, Electra, and Iphigenia in the aftermath of the trauma they all endured – the ‘sacrifice’ of Iphigenia, the murders of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and Orestes’ encounters with the Furies. The piece made it explicit that Orestes and Pylades were in a romantic relationship, and also portrayed queer aspects of Iphigenia’s relationship to the goddess Artemis, as well as exploring the queering of family dynamics more broadly. The narrative was designed to occupy the spaces in between the Greek tragedies that depict the myth of Orestes, exploring the more everyday, human moments that the characters go through between the heightened, tragic events of their major myths. At the end of the piece, the characters reflected explicitly on their use in later history, arguing for the importance of (re-)inserting queer characters into Greek mythology in order to foreground a shared history and genealogy of queerness.
Electra makes herself heard.
Some of the highlights were the powerful sequences smoothly combining text, music, and movement, which reflected both moments of intimacy between lovers and moments of recurring trauma. In some cases texts that had been written were actually translated into movement, delivered by the movements of the performer’s bodies rather than their words. These sequences in particular elicited strong emotional reactions from the audiences, and we were really pleased that they were so successful, as this kind of multi-media performance was what we had in mind for this project from the beginning.
So what next for Orestes? We’re now in the process of reviewing what we’ve achieved so far and mapping out where we’re going to go next. Keep your eyes on the blog and our Twitter feed, where we’ll be keeping everyone up to date with developments. There’s no doubt, though, that we’ll be taking forward the successes from this week and turning them into something even more exciting – and we can’t wait to share that with you!
With thanks to our wonderful audiences!
