Joe's Odyssey

I wrote last year about the third line of Homer’s Odyssey:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω

He saw the cities and knew the mind of many men

So much intrigue packed into just one line of dactylic…

I’m sitting outside a UT-Austin conference room listening to the end of a lecture that’s part of the 13th Biennial Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World Conference. I’m waiting to go in and perform my Odyssey for a roomful…

On a cold but sunny February Friday I returned to Northern Illinois University in DeKalb to perform the Odyssey for a myth class.  

I wrote about a previous performance at NIU almost two years ago and it holds up as…

No shows for 10 weeks and then 4 shows in 4 days: This was the busy dawning of my 2019 Odyssey schedule.

This is also the third year of keeping this blog, which so far has amounted to 55 dispatches…

Odysseus himself would have likely had a lot to say about the sentiment "absence makes the heart grow fonder."

I wrote last year about my first public performance of 2018 and how I continue to find "wonder" in the story…

Here's a simple truth I've learned about performing: everything is the show.

Everything.

Everything about the performance space, everything about the performer, everything about the audience.  

It all impacts the meaning of the work that's being performed in ways overt…

What's the relationship between "home" and "identity?"

The Odyssey is undoubtedly curious about where these two ideas intersect, philosophically and practically.  

It's clear that Odysseus feels he won't be wholly himself until he not only reaches his home in a…

I've remarked here (and on stage in discussion and to anyone who will listen and even to a lot people who aren't listen- hey, where are you going???!) over and over that I find the Odyssey's capacity to reveal human…

As the last harmonics of my Odyssey faded into the beautiful old assembly hall on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy on a rainy fall Tuesday night, I exhaled an easy breath and smiled.

The show in the small town…

Speaking extemporaneously about The Odyssey in front of audiences has become essential to my performances and maybe even my life.

For one, it's yet another way my existence as a modern bard mirrors that of my protagonist: Odysseus is just…

It happens every third show or so that an audience member comments that my version of The Odyssey sanitizes much of the violence of Homer's original, most notably in how I represent in an instrumental Odysseus' slaughter of the Suitors…

Before my Odyssey performance in Urbana, Illinois, on October 17, 2018, a beautiful sunny crisp fall Wednesday, the first and only time I was on the main University of Illinois campus was the weekend of April 16, 1994, and it…